Raffaele Costantini

Colonic lipomas (CLs) are benign tumors of the adipose tissue of the gastrointestinal tract that are often asymptomatic. A search of medical literature in English using PubMed and Google Scholar was conducted for articles related to CL. Occasionally, patients present with intestinal bleeding or obstructive symptoms. Although intussusception is commonly observed in children, it is rare in adults. Moreover, CL as the most common entity, is very rare, with an incidence rate of 0.035% to 4.4%. Although fatty composition can assist in diagnosis through computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, the latter cannot exclude local infiltration. CLs are distributed evenly between both sexes and can be located anywhere in the gastrointestinal tract; however, they are more frequently located in the colon, particularly in the right colon and cecum (39.6%), followed by the transverse colon (25%), descending colon (20.8%), and the sigmoid colon (14.6%). Symptoms included abdominal pain (79.2%), alterations in bowel habits (45.8%), rectal bleeding (22.9%), colocolic intussusception (50%), weight loss (6.2%), vomiting (14.6%), and nausea (12.5%). Surgical and endoscopic techniques are widely used to manage CLs. The challenge for physicians is differentiating this lesion from malignant colonic lesions, at the outset. The risk of misdiagnosis is possible, and the recommendation in cases of doubt is still segmental surgical resection, as it ensures correct collection of lymph nodes for appropriate staging of presumed colonic carcinoma.

Headache and visceral pain are common clinical painful conditions, which often co-exist in the same patients. Numbers relative to their co-occurrence suggest possible common pathophysiological mechanisms. The aim of the present narrative review is to describe the most frequent headache and visceral pain associations and to discuss the possible underlying mechanisms of the associations and their diagnostic and therapeutic implications based on the most recent evidence from the international literature. The conditions addressed are as follows: visceral pain from the cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and urogenital areas and primary headache conditions such as migraine and tension-type headache. The most frequent comorbidities involve the following: cardiac ischemic pain and migraine (possible shared mechanism of endothelial dysfunction, oxidative stress, and genetic and hormonal factors), functional gastrointestinal disorders, particularly IBS and both migraine and tension-type headache, primary or secondary dysmenorrhea and migraine, and painful bladder syndrome and headache (possible shared mechanisms of peripheral and central sensitization processes). The data also show that the various visceral pain–headache associations are characterized by more than a simple sum of symptoms from each condition but often involve complex interactions with the frequent enhancement of symptoms from both, which is crucial for diagnostic and treatment purposes.