Malignant rhabdoid tumor of the liver in a middle-aged woman: a case report and literature review

BACKGROUND: Extrarenal malignant rhabdoid tumor (EMRT) is a rare and high-mortality malignant tumor, which is more common in infants and rarely seen in adults. We firstly report a case of liver malignant rhabdoid tumor (MRT) with a loss of SMARCB1 gene (alias INI1, SNF5, BAF47) expression in a middle-aged woman, and preliminarily summarize the clinical characteristics and discuss its potential treatment of liver MRT by reviewing 55 cases reported in the past. CASE PRESENTATION: We report a 40-year-old woman who was admitted to our hospital for right epigastric pain. Previously, the patient was treated with liver hematoma in another hospital until she came to our hospital for abdominal pain again. In our hospital, we performed surgical treatment on her and the pathology diagnosed EMRT with negative expression of SMARCB1. After surgery, the patient underwent genetic testing, but failed to screen for sensitive targeted or conventional chemotherapy drugs, and she did not receive further treatment. Due to lack of timely diagnosis and effective chemotherapy drugs, tumor recurrence and metastasis occurred one year after surgery. Then the patient chose traditional Chinese medicine for treatment. And the metastatic tumors had still progressed after one year of treatment, but the patient didn’t have obvious discomfort symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: Liver MRT is a highly aggressive tumor with high metastatic potential and poor prognosis. It lacks specific symptoms and signs and is easy to be ignored and misdiagnosed. The mortality rate is extremely high as there is no effective treatment. But most tumors are accompanied by SMARCB1 deficiency, which may offer new research directions for cancer therapeutics. For the present, early detection, early diagnosis and early resection remain the key to improve the prognosis of patients.