CASE REPORT Open Access Transient small bowel intussusception in an adult: case report with intraoperative video and literature review Hager Aref † , Abrar Nawawi, Abdulmalik Altaf and Murad Aljiffry *† Abstract Background: The term intussusception refers to invagination of a segment of the gastrointestinal tract into the lumen of an adjacent segment. This is a rare entity and it is more prevalent in children and less common in adults. The diagnosis of intussusception in adults is difficult as a result of the nonspecific signs and symptoms. As there are many common causes of acute abdomen, intussusception should be considered when more frequent etiologies have been ruled out. The laparoscopic approach offers both a diagnostic option and a therapeutic one for intussusception in adults. Case presentation: We report a forty-one year old male patient, who presented to our Emergency Department complaining of peri-umbilical pain associated with nausea and vomiting for 1 day. Diagnosed with transient small bowel intussusception without any obvious underlying pathology. This report is the first to present an intra-operative video showing the small bowel intussuscepting and reducing spontaneously. Furthermore, the authors present a review about this rare condition, including previously reported similar cases in literature. Conclusion: Transient intussusception is extremely rare and is a challenging condition. Imaging techniques, especially CT scan, are helpful in the diagnosis of intussusception. However, laparoscopy offers the advantage of distinguishing transient intussusception from persistent intussusception. Keywords: Intussusception, Adult intussusception, Transient intussusception Background Intussusception has long been discussed in medical literature. Barbette of Amsterdam described the first case in 1674 [1]. In 1742, Cornelius Henrik Velse performed the first successful operation on adult in- tussusception [2]. Intussusception is a rare form of bowel obstruction in adults, which is defined as the telescoping of a proximal segment of the gastrointestinal tract, into the lumen of the adjacent distal segment [3]. The overall incidence of intussusception in adults is around 2–3 cases per 1,000,000 of the general population annually [4]. Intus- susception in adults is usually secondary to an existing pathology; in pediatric population, however it is mostly primary in origin. Furthermore, intussusception in adulthood differs from that in childhood in presentation, diagnosis and treatment. In adults, 90% of intussusceptions occur in small or large bowel and 10% affects the stomach or surgically created stomas [5]. While 60% of colonic in- tussusceptions in adults are induced by malignant tumor as the lead point, 30% of small bowel intussusceptions are caused by malignancy [6,7]. About 10% of small bowel intussusceptions in adults are idiopathic [8]. This article describes a case of a male adult with idiopathic transient small bowel intussusception. Case presentation We present the case of a forty-one year old male patient with previous medical history of Diabetes Mellitus, who never had any surgical intervention. He presented to our Emergency Department complaining of peri-umbilical * Correspondence: dr.aljiffry@gmail.com † Equal contributors Department of Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia © 2015 Aref et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Aref et al. BMC Surgery (2015) 15:36 DOI 10.1186/s12893-015-0020-6