Esophageal cancer refers to malignant tumors in the esophagus, while since early stage patients show no obvious symptoms, it is often easily overlooked. Esophageal cancer mostly manifested as difficulty in swallowing at the beginning, which is often ignored, so the majority of patients have been diagnosed with advanced stage when they visit a doctor. This greatly reduces the treatment effect, so early detection of esophageal cancer is essentially important. Then what are the diagnoses of esophageal cancer?

Diagnoses of Esophageal Cancer

As for esophageal cancer, the most commonly used methods are X-ray barium meal radiography, exfoliative cytology, esophageal endoscopic ultrasonography and fiber endoscopy examination.

1、Fiber endoscopy examination

Fiber endoscopy examination has gradually replaced the examination of hard metal pipe mirror nowadays. Because of the distinguishing features of flexibility, good lighting, wide visual range, safety and accuracy, fiber endoscopy examination has become a reliable observation method of upper digestive tract diseases, including esophageal cancer and stomach cancer. Fiber endoscopy is widely used as a clinical routine detection, postoperative follow-ups and clinical treatment effects observation tool. Among early stage esophageal cancer examinations, the detection rate of the fiber endoscope can be up to 85%.

2、Esophageal endoscopic ultrasonography examination

Esophageal endoscopic ultrasonography examination is also gradually applied clinically, the advantage of which is that it can determine the infiltration depth of the lesion within the esophageal wall more accurately. It can also measure the abnormal lymph nodes enlargement outside the wall and distinguish the location of the lesions in the esophageal wall.

3、Esophageal exfoliative cytology examination

Esophageal exfoliative cytology examination is a rather simple method which can reduce the pain of patients and with less false positive rate. Practice has proved that it is feasible to apply esophageal exfoliative cytology examination in esophageal cancer high incidence area and the total positive rate of the examination result is more than 90%. Esophageal cytology examination is the most preferred method of early esophageal cancer diagnosis.

4、X-ray barium meal radiography

Experienced radiologists will make the patients to swallow the barium substance in several times after fully mixed up. After multidirectional observation of double contrast barium meal radiography carefully, radiologists can discover mucosal depressions or ridges with a diameter of 2mm. But to cancers occur in the spray hilar, sometimes it is easily missed due to the location.

Experts from Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou remind that if one is diagnosed with esophageal cancer after related examination, he should go to regular hospitals for treatment promptly.