What Causes Stomach Ache After A Prostate Biopsy?

Posted on Thu, 21 Aug 2014

Question: My Husband had a prostate biopsy on 4/3/11. In late July he began to suffer stomach pain but it would come and go. Starting on 8/6/11 he started experincing severe pain and I tried to get in to go to emergency room. He would not. The pain started to worsen on 8/8/11 and escalated to excriiuiating 8/10/11. I call 911 and he was diagnosed with a perforated bowel. They performed emergency surgery but he was already septic. They repaired the perforated bowel but he was already septic. He was 64 and had severe cardiac issues and died at 10:06 pm 8/11/11. Could the prostate biopsy have caused the perforation? If so is is usual sometimes for a perforated bowel to have delayed symptoms rather than days within the biopsy?

Answered by Dr. Grzegorz Stanko (10 minutes later)

Brief Answer:
Detailed below.

Detailed Answer:
Hello!

Thank you for the query.

No, prostate biopsy could not cause it. Its 4 months of the gap between the biopsy and the bowels perforation. This is just impossible for mentioned biopsy to cause bowels perforation 4 months later.
The most probable reason of bowels perforation in his age is either diverticulitis and diverticle perforation or colon cancer.
Bowels perforation gives instant symptoms and if not treated causes sepsis within few days. It is also possible that bowels perforation can get healed by itself.

Hope this will help. Feel free to ask further questions.
Regards.

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Above answer was peer-reviewed by : Dr. Chakravarthy Mazumdar