A resident of Essex, UK, suffered from abdominal pain for more than a year and learned about a dangerous disease thanks to a comment on a social network. This is reported by the Daily Mirror.

20-year-old Annie Marshall said that she began to suffer from regular pains after food poisoning, which happened in March 2020. She was first diagnosed with an infection and prescribed treatment. However, the treatment did not help, and Annie continued to suffer from pain while eating.

Due to nutrition problems, she lost almost 13 kilograms. The girl continued examinations, and a year later, doctors reported that she had gastroparesis, a digestive disorder in which the functioning of the muscles of the gastrointestinal tract deteriorates, which leads to problems with emptying the stomach.

Marshall joined a group for gastroparesis sufferers and shared her frustration with ineffective treatment with other users. A woman saw her post and wrote to her with a proposal to check if she had Dunbar’s syndrome, in which a blood vessel (celiac trunk) is compressed by the median arcuate ligament. People with this syndrome are characterized by weight loss, bloating, pain after eating, and lack of appetite. This disease is difficult to determine immediately, it requires additional diagnostics and numerous tests.

Then the British again went to the doctor, the assumption of a stranger from the network was confirmed: she really had Dunbar’s syndrome. Marshall found a surgeon in the US who specializes in the condition and booked an operation in July.