A woman in her 30s in the United Kingdom has seen her weight cut nearly in half and received a terminal diagnosis after being diagnosed with the rare disease gastroparesis, according to a report.
Britain's Daily Mail reported Monday the case of Emily Cullum, 36, who lives in St Albans, Hertfordshire.
Cullum suddenly began vomiting severely while eating breakfast cereal. She assumed the milk had gone bad. With no fever and otherwise feeling fine, she dismissed the episode. But the symptoms persisted for 10 days. Vomiting continued after dinner, so severely that she experienced pain as if her ribs were broken. At the emergency room, she was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, but treatment brought no improvement. After suffering the same symptoms for three months, she paid out of pocket to see a specialist, who finally made an accurate diagnosis.
Gastroparesis is a rare disease in which the stomach fails to empty food properly, causing extremely slow digestion. In the United Kingdom, it occurs in about 14 out of every 100,000 people. Patients feel full after only a few bites and suffer from abdominal pain. Cullum's case was severe. Her weight dropped from 53 kilograms to 29 kilograms, nearly halving. Her medical team said she was "effectively in a state of forced anorexia" if she could not regain weight, adding that she would be unlikely to survive more than a year. For a mother of three, it amounted to a terminal sentence.
Cullum has since recovered her weight to 32 kilograms through a procedure that injects nutrients directly into her small intestine, but she remains severely underweight. She has launched an online fundraising campaign to cover the cost of total parenteral nutrition (TPN), a treatment that delivers nutrients directly into the bloodstream. Her target is 200,000 pounds (approximately 395 million won). The fundraising page states, "Without this treatment, my life expectancy will be much shorter. This is my last hope to stay with my beloved children for as long as possible."
In Korea, gastroparesis also occurs as a complication of diabetes or as an aftereffect of stomach surgery. In severe cases, it can lead to malnutrition and dehydration, making daily life difficult. If vomiting and nausea persist for a long time, if a person feels full after eating only a little, and if weight continues to decrease, experts recommend undergoing detailed examinations rather than dismissing the symptoms as simple indigestion.
