Esophageal cancer - symptoms

Esophageal cancer is a disease characterized by the formation of tumor cells from the epithelial membrane. In the male, cancer is twice as common as in women. Among all the patients suffering from this disease, the bulk (about 80%) are people over sixty.

Causes of the disease

Esophageal cancer, the symptoms of which often do not cause anxiety in the first stages of the disease, arise for the following reasons:

• addiction to hot and hot products;
• the ingestion of foods that injure the esophagus (small bones);
• bad habits;
• hypovitaminosis ;
• the presence of benign tumors of the esophagus or other of its diseases (tylosis, achalasia);
• Damage to the esophagus due to burns, both chemical and thermal.

Tumor of the esophagus - signs

In the initial stages, esophageal cancer is accompanied by:

• deterioration of well-being;
• weakness in the body;
• loss of appetite;
• decreased efficiency;
• sharp weight loss .

As these symptoms appear gradually, they remain undetected for a long time.

The growth of the tumor provokes the appearance of more serious symptoms:

• The first symptom of developing esophageal cancer is dysphagia, in which the patient becomes difficult to swallow food;
• feeling of squeezing in the chest, giving back to the neck and back;
• regurgitation (otgirgivanie) after eating or after drinking fluids;
• excessive salivation;
• in the late stages, when the tumor grows on the bronchi and trachea, the patient has a coughing cough;
• The hoarseness of the voice is due to the sprouting of the malignant plexus of the thoracic cavity.

Diagnosis of cancer

The definition of esophageal cancer in the event of its symptoms and symptoms occurs in several ways:

1. X-ray examination, which is one of the main methods of determining the tumor. This method allows you to assess the size of malignant formation, the degree of occlusion of the esophagus and the presence of contrast mass in the bronchi.
2. If symptoms of esophageal cancer occur, they resort to another method of diagnosis - esophagoscopy. It allows you to study the surface of the mucosa, assess the narrowed area and the scale of the tumor. A specialist can take a piece of tissue for further research. If the doctor has detected a malignant formation at the initial stage, then with the help of the same laboratory installation, he can remove it.
3. Examination by fibrobronchoscopy provides information on the germination of tumor formation in the bronchi and trachea.
4. With the help of computer tomography, the doctor reveals the size and nature of deformation of the esophagus, determines the presence of germination on other organs.
5. To exclude lesions of a metastatic nature in other important organs, ultrasound examination of organs located in the abdominal cavity is used.

Treatment of esophageal cancer

Surgical intervention is the main method of fighting this disease. However, its complexity consists in the fact that patients who are often depleted due to hunger and dysphagia, poorly tolerate removal of the esophagus and replacement of it with part of the large intestine or stomach.

The operation is performed in patients in the first and second stages of cancer. Because of the fact that with further development of the disease, swelling sprouts into the bronchi and other organs, surgical intervention can be difficult.

The patient, located in the third and fourth stages of the disease, creates a gastrostomy - a hole through which he receives food.

Now more and more often, radioactive irradiation of the esophagus is being used. In the latter stages, this procedure is performed to eliminate symptoms: pain relief and disposal of dysphagia.

Treatment of esophageal cancer gives a favorable prognosis only at stages 1 and 2, since in late terms patients often die from exhaustion.