Recently saw a baseball video where a man had one too many hotdogs at the game which resulted in him getting stomach pain the next day. When he went to the doctor they detected cancer in him and treated him.
How is it possible to detect cancer even before the symptoms show?
In: 3
Well cancer is an ongoing thing.
If that guy ate a ton of hotdogs and they then checked in on him due to stomach pain.. and he gets an ultrasound..or some other thing that can visually detect a cancer….be it a CT, xray, mri or maaany other methods.
well if a cancer emerged and is large around already it may be detected there… it wasn’t these specific hotdogs that caused the cancer… cancers or rather runaway stray cells that start to emerge are quite normal.. our bodies tend to just eliminate them fast enough before it becomes a problem..
Theres also subtle changes to your biology and smell profile with certain illnesses.. which is why dogs can famously smell out cancers.. up to a rate where they detect it more reliably than experts looking for it.. so we are doing ongoing research looking for those enzymes and markers. Making special tests. so that is another way to find illnesses pretty dang early.. for instance parkinsons and altzheimers seem to have subtle markers you can spot up to 15 if not 25 years early… there is an incredibly small amount of people that can smell these enzymes too.. which is quite eerie if you have that talent.. you just see potentially terminally ill people before they know it.. and you could choose to help them early but it is ethically quite questionable if you want to be that person to deliver those news…considering some things like altzheimers or parkinsons are quite the dead end.. sure not cancers but you attain quite the life changing / derailing Knowledge there.
Very lucky. Bowel cancer is cancer found anywhere in the large bowel, which includes the colon and rectum. It’s one of the most common types of cancer.
He probably had a **colonoscopy.** This is where a thin, flexible, tube with a camera is used to look inside your bowel to check for problems..
During the colonoscopy, a small sample of the lining of your bowel may be taken for testing (called a **biopsy**) when the tissue sample is examined under the microscope, abnormal cells may be identified, which can help to diagnose a specific condition.
stay safe
Because cancer can exist before it causes symptoms, and if you’re looking in the right spot you can find it, even if you were looking for some other reason.
There’s a whole bunch of ways.
Some are found by accident-e.g. you have a ct scan because we think you have appendicitis (pain on the right side of your body), incidental finding of a right sided renal (kidney) tumour.
Others are part of screening, so because you hit certain triggers (usually based on age but others exist, e.g. family history or pre-existing condition) you are asked to have a test that specifically looks for cancer, the idea being that they catch it early enough to be treated (and often before symptoms exist). Bowel cancer (colonoscopy and faecal testing) and breast cancer (mammograms) are two of the most common here.
And in still others there are symptoms just the patient hadn’t noticed/attributed any importance to them and someone asks the right questions and teases it out.
The real question here is in fact the reverse question: how is it possible that cancer exists for a while but without causing any symptoms.
And the answer is that inside our body there is a lot of space and not too much pain feeling nerves. A cancer can grow and not do any detectable harm. Most organs can be pushed away a little bit (like a few centimeters) without you even noticing it. Body is not made of solid materials (except bones), our body is more like jelly balls held together by the skin. (Okay, some exaggeration here.)
And that is why usually a symptomatic cancer is too late, it is already big enough to push something important.
Elevated T-cells in the blood. T-cell production responds to the presence of cancer, but the cells can’t attack the growth.
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