Large uterine arteriovenous malformation successfully treated with combined endovascular treatment and supracervical hysterectomy: A case report

Abstract

Uterine arteriovenous malformations (AVMs) are rare conditions that cause life-threatening bleeding. Endovascular treatment or total hysterectomy is performed to safely treat most AVMs. This case report describes a 54-year-old female patient with a large uterine AVM, uterine bleeding, and cardiac overload that was difficult to manage but successfully treated. Total hysterectomy poses a high risk of hemorrhage due to significant uterine and internal iliac vein dilation; thus, embolization of feeding arteries was performed with N-butyl cyanoacrylate. However, a postembolization computed tomography scan detected paradoxical embolization of the liver, kidneys, and spleen. Therefore, supracervical hysterectomy was performed with preoperative coil embolization and intraoperative balloon occlusion of the feeding arteries. In this case, supracervical, not total, hysterectomy needed to be performed as the shunts were determined to be in the uterine corpus.

Keywords

• Uterine arteriovenous malformation
• Supracervical hysterectomy
• Embolization
• Balloon occlusion
• Paradoxical embolization