When surgeons opened a 65-year-old man's chest for heart bypass surgery, they found his heart pushed far to the right. For two years, doctors blamed a missing lung lobe. The real explanation proved stranger: a weak, abnormally high diaphragm let his stomach and colon swell upward after meals, nudging his heart out of place before it slid back as his gut emptied.
Physicians at Alborz University of Medical Sciences in Karaj, Iran, reported the case on August 5, 2026, in Case Reports in Pulmonology. The authors say that, to their knowledge, it is the first report of this kind of reversible, meal-triggered heart shift in an adult with congenital diaphragmatic eventration.
