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Rare disease
CASE REPORT
Rare case of Propionibacterium acnes-related splenic abscess
  1. Subhan Mohammed1,2,
  2. Vidya S Kollu1
  1. 1Department of Internal Medicine, McLaren Regional Medical Center, Flint, Michigan, USA
  2. 2Department of Neurology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Subhan Mohammed, drsubhanaziz{at}gmail.com

Summary

A 64-year-old woman with a medical history of morbid obesity, chronic hepatitis C, essential hypertension, multiple episodes of abdominal cellulitis, diabetes mellitus type 2 on insulin, intravenous and subcutaneous drug abuse presented to the emergency department complaining of left lower chest pain for 6 weeks along with multiple episodes of vomiting. Initial laboratory data revealed leucocytosis of 17 200×103/μL with left shift. She reported multiple episodes of fever spikes. Abdominal and pelvic CT showed a splenic hypodense lesion. Specimens from interventional radiology aspiration and splenectomy grew Propionibacterium acnes. Following splenectomy, patient’s symptoms resolved. To the best of our knowledge, this would represent the fifth reported case of P. acnes splenic abscess.

  • infectious diseases
  • diabetes
  • interventional radiology
  • general surgery

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bcr-2018-225858

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors SM: wrote the main manuscript and was involved in literature search; actively involved in the patient care; wrote both the initial and the final draft of the manuscript. VK: assisted in literature search and revision of the manuscript.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Obtained.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Presented at Michigan State University Flint Area Medical Education Conference May 2018, American College of Physicians Michigan Chapter Meeting 2017