Know About Stomach Cancer (Gastric Adenocarcinoma).

What is stomach cancer?

Stomach cancer occurs when cancerous cells form in the stomach lining.
This type of cancer usually doesn’t cause symptoms until the later stages, so it’s often not diagnosed until it’s more advanced.
While difficult to detect, treatment for stomach cancer is possible through chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery.
Stomach cancer is characterized by a growth of cancerous cells within the lining of the stomach. Also called gastric cancer, this type of cancer is difficult to diagnose because most people typically don’t show symptoms in the earlier stages.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates there’ll be approximately 28,000 new cases of stomach cancer in 2017. The NCI also estimates that stomach cancer is 1.7 percent of new cancer cases in the United States.

While stomach cancer is relatively rare compared to other types of cancer, one of the biggest dangers of this disease is the difficulty of diagnosing it. Since stomach cancer usually doesn’t cause any early symptoms, it often goes undiagnosed until after it spreads to other parts of the body. This makes it more difficult to treat.

Though stomach cancer can be hard to diagnose and treat, it’s important to get the knowledge you need to beat the disease.

What causes stomach cancer?
Your stomach (along with the esophagus) is just one part of the upper section of your digestive tract. Your stomach is responsible for digesting food and then moving the nutrients along to the rest of your digestive organs, namely the small and large intestines.

Stomach cancer occurs when normally healthy cells within the upper digestive system become cancerous and grow out of control, forming a tumor. This process happens slowly. Stomach cancer tends to develop over many years.


Risk factors of stomach cancer
Stomach cancer is directly linked to tumors in the stomach. However, there are some factors that might increase your risk of developing these cancerous cells. These risk factors include certain diseases and conditions, such as:

lymphoma (a group of blood cancers)
H. pylori bacterial infections (a common stomach infection that can sometimes lead to ulcers)
tumors in other parts of the digestive system
stomach polyps (abnormal growths of tissue that form on the lining of the stomach)
Stomach cancer is also more common among:

older adults, usually people 50 years and older
men
smokers
people with a family history of the disease
people who are of Asian (especially Korean or Japanese), South American, or Belarusian descent
While your personal medical history can impact your risk of developing stomach cancer, certain lifestyle factors can also play a role. You may be more likely to get stomach cancer if you:

eat a lot of salty or processed foods
eat too much meat
have a history of alcohol abuse
don’t exercise
don’t store or cook food properly
You may want to consider getting a screening test if you believe you’re at risk for developing stomach cancer. Screening tests are performed when people are at risk for certain diseases but don’t show symptoms yet.

Symptoms of stomach cancer
According to the NCI, there are typically no early signs or symptoms of stomach cancer. Unfortunately, this means that people often don’t know anything is wrong until the cancer has reached an advanced stage.

Some of the most common symptoms of advanced stomach cancer are:

nausea and vomiting
frequent heartburn
loss of appetite, sometimes accompanied by sudden weight loss
constant bloating
early satiety (feeling full after eating only a small amount)
bloody stools
jaundice
excessive fatigue
stomach pain, which may be worse after meals

How is it diagnosed?
Since people with stomach cancer rarely show symptoms in the early stages, the disease is often not diagnosed until it’s more advanced.

To make a diagnosis, your doctor will first perform a physical exam to check for any abnormalities. They may also order a blood test, including a test for the presence of H. pylori bacteria.

More diagnostic tests will need to be done if your doctor believes that you show signs of stomach cancer. Diagnostic tests specifically look for suspected tumors and other abnormalities in the stomach and esophagus. These tests may include:

an upper gastrointestinal endoscopy
a biopsy
imaging tests, such as CT scans and X-rays

Treating stomach cancer
Traditionally, stomach cancer is treated with one or more of the following:

chemotherapy
radiation therapy
surgery
immunotherapy, such as vaccines and medication
Your exact treatment plan will depend on the origin and stage of the cancer. Age and overall health can also play a role.

Aside from treating cancer cells in the stomach, the goal of treatment is to prevent the cells from spreading. Stomach cancer, when left untreated, may spread to the:

lungs
lymph nodes
bones
liver

Preventing stomach cancer
Stomach cancer alone can’t be prevented. However, you can lower your risk of developing all cancers by:

maintaining a healthy weight
eating a balanced, low-fat diet
quitting smoking
exercising regularly
In some cases, doctors may even prescribe medications that can help lower the risk of stomach cancer. This is usually done for people who have other diseases that may contribute to the cancer.

You may also want to consider getting an early screening test. This test can be helpful in detecting stomach cancer. Your doctor may use one of the following screening tests to check for signs of stomach cancer:

physical exam
lab tests, such as blood and urine tests
imaging procedures, such as X-rays and CT scans
genetic tests

Article Resources

Cancer stat facts: Stomach cancer. (n.d.). http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/stomach.html
Mayo Clinic Staff. (2017). Stomach cancer: Diagnosis. http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/stomach-cancer/diagnosis-treatment/diagnosis/dxc-20202339
Stomach cancer. (2014). https://familydoctor.org/condition/stomach-cancer/?adfree=true
Stomach (gastric) cancer – Patient version. (n.d.). http://www.cancer.gov/types/stomach
What is stomach cancer? (2016). https://www.cancer.org/cancer/stomach-cancer/about/what-is-stomach-cancer.html

See Also

Do you know about Cancer-Detecting Pen

This cancer-detecting pen could one day help surgeons better remove tumors

The pen can identify cancerous tissue in 10 seconds

The MasSpec Pen

Photo by Vivian Abagiu / University of Texas at Austin

Scientists have developed a “pen” that can help surgeons identify cancer cells within 10 seconds. The tool could one day be used during surgeries to quickly determine what tissue should be cut in order to remove tumors completely.

The device, called MasSpec Pen, isn’t perfect yet, however; it can distinguish between cancerous and healthy tissue with about 96 percent accuracy. But the team behind the device, described this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine, hopes that the pen will be tested in surgeries as early as next year.

When a patient undergoes surgery to get rid of a tumor, a surgeon tries to remove all cancerous tissue while preserving the healthy tissue. In the case of breast cancer, for instance, the task is particularly delicate, as the surgeon tries to remove the tumor while preserving the rest of the breast. Right now, surgeons can send tissue samples to a lab for analysis, which can take days. Tissue can also be frozen and analyzed during the operation, but that takes 15 to 20 minutes. (The more time-consuming method is more accurate than the so-called “frozen section,” according to the National Cancer Institute.)

In search for a quicker but still accurate tool, researchers in Texas developed a handheld “pen” that gets the job done in 10 seconds. It uses a tiny amount of water — 10 microliters — to extract molecules from a person’s tissue. The water-molecules combo is then sent through tubes to an instrument that can identify the molecular fingerprint of cancer, telling the surgeon whether the tissue is healthy or cancerous.
An illustration of the pen and the instrument, called a mass spectrometer, that analyzes the tissue.

 Illustration: University of Texas at Austin

The researchers tested the device on 253 human tissue samples of breast, lung, thyroid, and ovarian cancer, as well as healthy tissue. The pen was accurate 96 percent of the time, the study says. The researchers also tested the MasSpec Pen while operating on mice with tumors, finding that the device didn’t damage tissue or stress the animals.

Before the pen is adopted, it needs to be tested on more tissue samples, as well as during actual surgeries in clinical trials. It also needs to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. The instrument that actually analyzes the tissue takes up a lot of space for now, but the team is already testing a smaller one, according to STAT.

Still, the pen seems to be a big improvement on current methods, and the researchers hope to start testing it during surgeries in 2018.

Risk of bladder cancer possibly traced to drinking water

The National Cancer Institute, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, the U.S. Geological Survey, and departments of health in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire collaborated on a study examining the potential that drinking water from wells dug in the first half of the 20th century could be a factor in the northern New England region’s elevated risk and incidence of bladder cancer.

The results of the study were published this month in the “Journal of the National Cancer Institute.”

Rates of bladder cancer in those three states are about 20 percent higher than in the entire United States overall, for both men and women. The region has a high percentage of the population that get their drinking water from private wells not maintained by cities and town services, and that are not subject to federal regulation.  These wells may contain arsenic, generally at low to moderate levels. Previous studies have shown that consumption of water containing high concentrations of arsenic increases the risk of bladder cancer.

Arsenic can occur naturally, coming out of rock deep beneath the earth, but pesticides containing arsenic were also used extensively in the region on crops between the 1920s and the 1950s.

“Arsenic is an established cause of bladder cancer, largely based on observations from earlier studies in highly exposed populations,” said Debra Silverman, Sc.D., chief of the Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch, NCI, and senior author on the study. “However, emerging evidence suggests that low to moderate levels of exposure may also increase risk.”

Researchers compared 1,213 people newly diagnosed with bladder cancer with 1,418 people without bladder cancer who lived in the same geographic areas as those who developed the disease.

“Although smoking and employment in high-risk occupations both showed their expected associations with bladder cancer risk in this population, they were similar to those found in other populations,” said Silverman. “This suggests that neither risk factor explains the excess occurrence of bladder cancer in northern New England.”

Researchers found that increasing exposure to drinking water containing arsenic was associated with an increased risk of bladder cancer. When investigators focused on participants who had used private wells, they saw that people who drank the most water had almost twice the risk of those who drank the least. This association was stronger if dug wells had been used. Dug wells are shallow, less than 50 feet deep, and potentially susceptible to contamination from manmade sources. Most of the dug well use occurred a long time ago, during an era when arsenic concentrations in private well water were largely unknown. However, the risk was substantially higher if the dug well use began before 1960 (when application of arsenic-based pesticides was commonplace in this region) than if dug well use started later.

Researchers were unable to precisely measure the arsenic exposure over participants’ entire lifetimes, which, they admit made it challenging to accurately quantify the contribution of arsenic exposure to the excess risk of bladder cancer.

“There are effective interventions to lower arsenic concentrations in water,” said Silverman. “New England has active public health education campaigns instructing residents to test their water supply and to install and maintain filters if levels are above the EPA threshold. But we should emphasize that smoking remains the most common and strongest risk factor for bladder cancer, and therefore smoking cessation is the best method for reducing bladder cancer risk.”


Our Social Link
https://www.facebook.com/groups/814767662005504/
https://www.facebook.com/technetinfos/
https://t.co/hXL2gNZDJy