View: How a Man Found Out He Has Testicular Cancer From Taking a Pregnan...

How a Man Found Out He Has Testicular Cancer From Taking a Pregnan...

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Rather strange news was bouncing around Reddit recently, and it all started with a man relieving himself on a pregnancy test stick. In case you don’t know how a pregnancy stick works, here’s a quick tutorial: remove stick from box, pee on stick, watch to see if a pink line, blue line, plus or minus symbol, or whatever symbol the instructions tell you to look for appears.  If the symbol appears, you are probably pregnant — that is, if you’re a woman.

So imagine the surprise of the man (a friend of a Reddit user known as CappnPoopDeck) when the stick he peed on showed a positive symbol. CappnPoopDeck understandably thought this was worth mentioning; actually he thought it was worth creating a rage comic about, so he did.  The very first person to comment was a user named goxilo, who said: “If this is true, you should check yourself for testicular cancer. Seriously. Google it.”

Sure enough, goxilo was correct, and his comment may have saved CappnPoopDeck’s friend’s life.

So what’s going on here?  The short story is that all pregnancy tests are checking for the same thing: a pregnancy hormone called Human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG).  HCG is produced by the placenta in women (the temporary organ that forms when an embryo has attached to the uterine lining) and is thus a reliable indicator of pregnancy.

As it turns out, HCG is also produced in men suffering from a rare but aggressive form of testicular cancer called choriocarcinoma. Choriocarcinoma tumors secrete HCG, and it’s identical to the hormone secreted by placentas.

No one is exactly sure why HCG is secreted by choriocarcinoma tumors, but what is certain is that having this form of testicular cancer is extremely bad. The cancer moves fast, typically spreading to other organs in the body before the patient is even aware he has it, and it usually strikes men age 30 and younger.

The good news is that CappnPoopDeck’s friend took goxilo’s advice to heart and was seen by a doctor. The doc found a very small tumor in his right testicle, but found it early enough that it’s going to make treatment easier.

So is it worth running out to buy a pregnancy test to check for testicular cancer? Probably not. This particular form of cancer makes up less than 1% of all testicular cancer diagnoses, which is itself a relatively rare form of cancer.

Here’s a great write up about the story at boingboing that delves more deeply into the science, and a story at Gawker.

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