Early stomach cancer often does not show very clear symptoms.
Symptoms and diagnosis of stomach cancer
Like with most cancers of internal your organs, symptoms mostly occur when the cancer is well-progressed, and therefore already difficult to treat.
You will undergo a lot of tests in order to make sure what is the cause of your symptoms. Your specialist will be a gastro-enterologist: a doctor who specializes in diagnosing and treating digestive problems.
- know your family history
- a GP can check your abdomen for fluid, swelling, or other changes. he can look for swollen lymph nodes and check your skin and eyes if they seem yellow. I must say my father died of metastatic liver cancer without ever showing symptoms of jaundice…
The next step will be to take X-rays of your esophagus (the pipe between your throat and stomach) and stomach. You need to drink a "white blubber". It’s a barium solution to make your stomach show up more clearly on the x-rays.
Around the same time you will have to do an endoscopy: it’s a camera to look in your stomach with a tube (endoscope) through your mouth. Of course this all happens under local anesthesia.
During the endoscopy, doctors can remove "strange" tissue from your stomach and do a biopsy on it. The laboratory will check the tissue under a microscope to find out wheter or not there are cancer cells.
Since the results will be send to a lab, you could gain some time doing the biopsy in a hospital that has its own lab.
A biopsy is the surest way to know if cancer cells are present or not.
Always consult your doctors and read more about stomach cancer symptoms!