- Basic
- Symptoms
- Diagnosis
- Treatments
What is Stomach Cancer?
Stomach cancer refers to cancer happened in stomach, which originates from epithelium mucosae cells on top layer of stomach wall, and can be happened in any parts of the stomach (the most common is on sinus ventriculi pylorus area, followed by fundus cardia area, least on body of stomach), and can also invade into stomach wall of different depth or different width.
Incidence of Stomach Cancer
The annual incidence of stomach cancer is about 0.000176; there are high incidence rates in Japan and Denmark, while American and Australia are relatively low in incidence rate; meanwhile, the incidence rate of male is higher than that of female, and it is about 3:1; the peak age for incidence is among 50-60 years of old.
Common Causes of Stomach Cancer
1. Environment factor: incidences of different countries or different areas are obviously different;
2. Diet factor: long term intake of milden and rot food, brined vegetable or pickling fish or meat, overtaken salt shall increase the risk of stomach cancer;
3. Inherent factor: epidemiologic investigation found that stomach cancer has the tendency of family-centralizing;
4. Immunity factor: people with lower immunity shall have higher risk of stomach cancer.
Dieting Principles after Surgery
1. Eat less while multiple times for meal;
2. Intake food that is rich in protein and can be easily digested, like rice water, egg soup, jardinière soup, milk, albumen powder, etc.;
3. Eat less sweets or fats;
4. Prohibit too cold or hot or spicy and stimulative food or seasoning, and stimulative drinking like wine or tea;
5. Prevent anaemia and properly intake some lean meat, fish, shrimp, animal liver, Chinese jujube and so on;
6. When eating food that is relatively coarse and hard to digest, chew it and swallow it carefully and slowly.
What kinds of supports can be obtained?
Practice proves that the clinic team services composed by multiple disciplines like oncosurgery, oncology, pathology, imageology and anesthesia doctors as well as professional nurses, can provide patients with most effective, most suitable and most economic treatment plan, and also can greatly improve the therapeutic effect of treating cancer patients.
“One station” medical system constructed by Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou combining multiple disciplines, can perform comprehensive diagnosis and treatment for patients under the condition of without adding patients’ burden. Therefore, on one hand, it can provide all-round and heartfelt medical services, and on the other hand, it improves medical efficiency and level. There are many channels can be applied to conduct the communication between patients and doctors, like online consultation, email, telephone conversation, and face-to-face consultation. All these consultation services can effectively help patients to fight the cancer. While the medical team faced by the patients includes doctors, nurses, dietitians, interpreters and so on to meet various demands in different level of different countries. Patients would be more confident under the unobstructed communication environment to cooperate the hospital to diagnose and treat the diseases.
Stomach cancer is a malignant tumor with high incidence while its death rate is increasing day by day. This phenomenon can attribute to the indefinite early symptoms, for which causing the late diagnosis and treatments. Then what are the more obvious symptoms present in early stomach cancer?
Symptoms in Early Stage
1. Repletion and upset of upper abdomen. This symptom would go through the whole course of stomach cancer. As a most common sign of early stomach cancer, repletion and upset in upper abdomen without obvious cause would develop in over 70% patients from early stage. It mostly occurs when patients are quiet and disappears once patients are in activity or distracted. And even diet regulation can do little effect on this symptom.
2. Sour regurgitation and burning sensation in stomach. Early stomach cancer patients would complain of stomach upset and the vague aching pain can relieve through medicine. Some cases develop the signs like abdominal distention and belching after meals, which may be diagnosed mistakenly as gastritis by doctors.
3. Symptoms like loss of weight and lack of power occur. The development of these symptoms is because of loss of appetite in a short time. Though loss of appetite is one sign of early stomach cancer, patients won’t note it highly as it doesn’t show any pain in stomach.
If the patient has been suffering from stomach cancer for a long time, he may occur bleeding in enteron during daily life. The most common symptoms of that are vomiting of blood, black stool and fecal occult blood presents positive.
Stomach Cancer Symptoms in Late Stage
Actually some symptoms of late stomach cancer are the amplification of early stomach cancer symptoms, which namely is predictable.
1.Being thin and weak, anemia.
2.A long-term upper abdomen pain is also a symptom that would appear in stomach cancer patients in late stage, which is difficult to be relieved.
3.With a high probability to spread, stomach cancer in late stage can directly extend to adjacent pancreas, liver, transverse colon and other organs. It also can travel to the lymph nodes around stomach or distant lymph nodes , for example, some hard and stable lymph nodes can be touched in left supraclavicular region. When it transfers to liver, lung, brain, bones and ovaries, etc., the patient may develop ascites, jaundice and swelling of liver. Perforation, bleeding and necrosis of stomach and other complications are found in serious cases even. Besides, stomach cancer in late stage may present pain in upper abdomen, loss of appetite and weight, lack of power, vomit, black stools or positive fecal occult blood and so no.
4.Other symptoms
The stomach cancer in cardiac part would present a feeling that cannot swallow smoothly, which would further develop to swallowing difficulty and regurgitation of food. Acute gastric perforation aroused from stomach cancer would show the symptoms like pain in whole abdomen and peritonitis. Several cases may have diarrhea, constipation, lower abdomen upset and fever and so on.
Stomach cancer brings patients agony that once related symptoms are found, the patient should come to regular hospital for examination and treatments right away. Timely treatments can effectively improve the life quality and extend life span of patients.
With the developing and innovating of medical service level, the diagnosis methods for diseases are increasing. There are various methods to diagnose gastric cancer while the following methods can effectively diagnose it, systematically evaluating patient’s condition so as to better choose treatment.
Diagnosis Methods of Gastric Cancer
1. Endoscopy: it is also called fibergastroscopy, which is very important to the diagnosis of early gastric cancers. Endoscopy can help detect early gastric cancer, identify the benign and malignant ulcers and determine types of gastric cancer as well as infiltrating range of lesions. It has certain significance for regular follow-up and monitoring of patients with precancerous lesions.
2. X-ray: the result will be different for gastric cancer in different stages. Generally for the early stage of gastric cancer, X-ray can show that cancer cells are only confined to the mucosa and submucosa. While in the processing stages of gastric cancer, it can be showed that X ray signs are closely related to the types of gastric cancer.
3. CT scan: it can clearly show whether cancer cells have invaded gastric wall and the range that cancer cells grow inside and outside the gastric wall, and whether there are metastases, besides, CT scan may also show whether gastric cancer has spread through blood channels.
4. Endoscopic ultrasound: this is a very new diagnostic technique. When diagnosing, it can directly see every layer of stomach, the overall picture of tumor. Endoscopic ultrasound helps to diagnose gastric cancer and its TNM staging.
Gastroscopy Is Not That Uncomfortable
When patients go to hospital due to indigestion, doctors will often require the patient to undergo gastroscopy. Some patients will hesitate because they fear that gastroscopy will bring discomfort. In recent years, the quality of endoscopic mirror is constantly improving, becoming more delicate and easier to maneuverable. Furthermore, undergone by an experienced doctor, the majority of patients only feel mild discomfort. Generally, skilled physicians only need 3-5 minutes to complete a gastroscopy and with complicated conditions, it will rarely exceed 10 minutes. Therefore, the majority of patients are able to accept the examination. Gastroscopy generally does not cause pain but feeling nausea and having difficulty in breathing. Due to the patient's fear and reflection when endoscope inserts into esophagus through pharynx, the majority of patients will temporarily hold their breath, which is like a person who can't swim dropping into water pool, will stop breathing spontaneously. Patients begin to breathe until they cannot hold on, causing nausea. Therefore, the key to undergo gastroscopy smoothly is that patients do not hold breathe and regulate breath on balance.
Capsule Endoscopy Easily Check Stomach Diseases
Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou introduces capsule endoscopy which can help patients easily check stomach. Patients only need to swallow a special "capsule", thus will avoid all the discomfort. With the development of medical technology, capsule endoscopy has been applied widely in clinic. Diagnosing level for unexplained gastrointestinal bleeding, abdominal pain has been greatly improved.
“Capsule endoscopy" is shortened from “intelligent capsule gastrointestinal endoscopy system". Patients only need to orally take a intelligent capsule with water, and then the capsule will move along stomach - duodenum - jejunum and ileum - colon - rectum through the peristalsis of gastrointestinal muscles, which seems like doing a whole-process "gastrointestinal photographer" and then transmits the images by digital signals to a recording device carried by patient, thus doctor can make a timely diagnosis through the captured image. The whole process takes about 8 to 10 hours and patients can leave hospital working during this period. Patients only need to send the recorder back and doctors will check the condition of esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine according to nearly 80000 photographs. To the end of this task, the capsule will be excreted with feces.
Capsule endoscopy replaces the gastrointestinal examinations such as traditional gastroscopy and barium meal. On the one hand, it can avoid physical pain caused by examinations, on the other hand, it also has solved the problem that has been regarded as a check blind area --5-7 meters of small intestine, because the current enteroscope technique can only check large intestine but cannot see small intestine. While by using this "intelligent capsule", many of the early small bowel diseases can be found in advance and then get early treatment.
Diagnosis methods and techniques of diseases are also very important. Accurate test can decrease the rate of misdiagnosis, helping patients accurately choose reasonable treatment options according to their condition, so as to better improve the treatment effect of gastric cancer.
Stomach cancer is a malignant cancer with high incidence and death rate. In order to control it and offer people a health life, medical workers contribute to studies of stomach cancer treatments and have gained important breakthrough. Therefore, stomach cancer patients should keep a nice mood and positively cooperate with doctors for treatments without worry, then better cure effect can be acquired.
Treatments for Stomach Cancer Patient in Different Stages
Generally treatments would be different according to the stages of stomach cancer. Usually radical excision is given to the stomach cancer patients in stage I andⅡand after that would be biological treatment. The only difference of treatments between these two stages is chemotherapy won’t be given to the stage I patients, but would properly perform on the patients from stageⅡaccording to post-operative condition. Radical excision, such as external stripping and excision of omental bursa would positively apply to patients of stage Ⅲ. To the patients who cannot have radical excision, palliative excision would be operated and combined with post operative chemotherapy and biological therapy. The patients develop to stage Ⅳ, if their physical condition allow, palliative excision or gastronesteostomy would be performed. Based on the principle of treatments for patients of stomach cancer, stage Ⅳ, chemotherapy, chemotherapy of arterial cannulation and biological therapy normally are applied to these patients.
Those traditional therapies work certainly on stomach cancer, but coming with that are poor cure effect and severe side effects. In past few years, many new treatments were developed and applied clinically, among them there is minimally invasive treatment for cancers, an extensively used cancer treatment in 21 century. Minimally invasive treatment includes Ar-He knife, particle implantation, interventional therapy, radio frequency, photon knife, cellular immunotherapy and so on. Based on patient condition, selectively use different therapies can control tumor, improve immunity and life quality of patients while it can also reduce the risk of cancer recurrence and spread.
New Technology in Treating Stomach Cancer
By inserting the freezing probes in minimally invasive way into tumor, Ar-He cryothearpy can freeze tumor cells to minus 160 centi-degree within several seconds while later it can rapidly increase the temperature to 40 centi-degree. In this way, it can kill cancer cells effectively without affecting normal cells. Particle implantation is under the guide of CT or ultrasound B, use special apparatus to implant the 125 I particles, a particle can radiateγray constantly, inside tumor. Then cancer cells would gradually die for the constant radiation ofγray. Radio frequency ablation kills and melts tumor in physical method that under the imaging guidance to insert the heat generator into tumor. Cellular immunotherapy stimulates the tumor immunity of stomach cancer patients through transfusing the immune cells with antineoplasmic activity to treat the tumor.
All treatments mentioned above are minimally invasive therapies. Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou treats stomach cancer in combined therapy, which means to choose and combine different treatments based on patient condition and advantages of each therapy to make up the shortages in treatments. Thus the cancer can be effectively treated, at the same time, the spread and recurrence of cancer can be controlled.
In a word, in order to acquire better cure effect, the patient should take examination of stomach cancer to confirm the condition first, and then choose the proper treatment based on examination report.
If you have any questions, please contact us via online consultation, email or phone call. If you find our website useful, please follow our FaceBook and YouTube, health information will be updated regularly.
