This Woman Doesn’t Have an Eating Disorder—But She’s Starving to Death

A 32-year-old woman in Wisconsin is starving to death due to a rare disorder that prevents her body from digesting food.

Lisa Brown has superior mesenteric artery syndrome (SMAS), a condition that has trapped part of her small intestine between two arteries. As a result, food can’t pass through her body.

Lisa went from 140 pounds to less than 90 pounds in five years, struggling all the while to find an answer for her weight loss, Cleveland’s NewsNet5 reports. She created a YouTube video about her struggle in January to raise awareness about her condition.

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She’s now seeking treatment at The Cleveland Clinic, where she is hooked up to a feeding system that sends nutrients directly to her small intestine via her abdomen. Her family has started a GoFundMe page to pay her huge medical bills, which has raised more than $12,000 toward her $50,000 goal.

Lisa’s story is rare, but SMAS happens—and experts say it’s difficult to diagnose.

Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, a feeling of fullness, abdominal pain, and bloating—which can occur with a variety of illnesses.

“The symptoms are very nonspecific for the syndrome itself and it’s so uncommon,” says Gabriel Pivawer, a doctor of osteopathic medicine and a radiologist at JFK Medical Center who has seen several cases of SMAS and written a case study about the illness. “It often takes years to diagnose these patients and to correctly treat them and get a good outcome,” he says.

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While SMAS is rare, it can be sparked by rapid weight loss or trauma to the abdomen, says gastroenterologist Truptesh Kothari, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center who has treated several cases of SMAS. People who have scoliosis or have thin frames are also at risk, he says.

Here’s the scariest part: If SMAS is left untreated, the patient can die.

There are two main treatment options for a person suffering from SMAS, says Kothari. The first, which he prefers, is through an endoscopy that passes a feeding tube through a person’s nose past the portion of the intestine that has the compression. After about six weeks, the patient typically gains enough weight to create a “fat pad” which may lessen the compression.

The second is through surgery to try to correct the compression.

Despite the intense symptoms and treatment options, Kothari says SMAS is “absolutely treatable.”

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Concerned that you or someone you know may have SMAS? Kothari says there is one symptom that is distinctive: People with SMAS who lay down on their left side in the fetal position may temporarily feel better.

Lisa says she doesn’t expect that her health will ever be the same. “This disease and malnutrition has damaged my body,” she tells NewsNet5, but she’s still planning to fight. “I don’t fear death,” she says, “because I don’t put that in my vocabulary yet.”