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I went from washboard abs to looking like I’d swallowed a basketball, says TV star – doctors blamed gluten
The mum-of-one reveals how she eventually discovered she had a disease which kills tens of thousands of people every year
ONE day Maria Menounos was a fitness fanatic with washboard abs - the next, she looked like she had swallowed a basketball.
And she lived like that for 18 months until she finally discovered the truth.
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The American TV presenter was eventually diagnosed with stage two pancreatic cancer after doctors found a 1.5in tumour in January.
But for months, they had passed her symptoms off as a gluten intolerance.
Thankfully, Maria, who used to host Extra and E!, is now cancer-free after having life-saving surgery.
But she wants to use her experience as a lesson to others to know the tell-tale signs and symptoms of the disease, which has the lowest survival rate of all common cancers.
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She told : "I really encourage anybody who’s having any consistent pain or symptoms like diarrhoea, bloating, gas or constipation to look deeper.
"A lot of people just want to shush their bodies and go back to work and go back to life and pretend it’s not happening. I’ve been there.
"But you can’t just listen to somebody else tell you what’s happening in your body.
"If the pain persists, you have to keep fighting."
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Pancreatic cancer kills around 50,000 people in the US and 5,000 in the UK every year.
The 45-year-old, who has worked as a TV correspondent for Today and Access Hollywood, first noticed something wasn't quite right while waiting for her daughter Athena to be born via surrogate.
She was experiencing serious bloating, and "for at least a year and a half or so I looked like I had swallowed a basketball," she told Hoda Kotb on the Making Space podcast.
"I've been on fitness covers my whole career with flat washboard abs and never had that. [I thought], 'What's going on?'"
Her symptoms worsened still after eating a farro salad on a flight when she felt like her insides were going to "explode".
"These weird abdominal pains were super strong and I thought I was going to die," she said.
This left her convinced she was intolerant to gluten or had coeliac disease (which requires a strict gluten-free diet).
But an endoscopy and colonoscopy - a test to check inside the body - in March 2022 didn't find the source of the problem.
She learnt she had type 1 diabetes in June that year, but a CT scan still suggested her pancreas was "unremarkable".
Her symptoms persisted, and Maria, who co-hosted the Eurovision Song Contest 2006 in Athens, Greece, was now constantly buckled over in pain.
Unable to take it any longer, she visited a different hospital for a full-body MRI, which revealed the pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour.
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Maria, from Medford, Massachusetts, underwent surgery to have it removed in February, as well as part of her pancreas, spleen and 17 lymph nodes.
Luckily, the cancer hadn't spread and requires no further treatment.
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The symptoms of pancreatic cancer
PANCREATIC cancer may not have any symptoms, or they might be hard to spot. But you might notice
- The whites of your eyes or your skin turn yellow (jaundice), and you may also have itchy skin, darker pee and paler poo than usual
- Loss of appetite or losing weight without trying to
- Feeling tired or having no energy
- A high temperature, or feeling hot or shivery
- Feeling or being sick
- Diarrhoea or constipation, or other changes in your poo
- Pain at the top part of your tummy and your back, which may feel worse when you're eating or lying down and better when you lean forward
- Symptoms of indigestion, such as feeling bloated
Source: NHS
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