Unluckily, mesothelioma symptoms and asbestos, just like coughing, difficulty breathing, chest pain, resemble various types of lung-related ailment. Symptoms can be quite different based on the kind of cancer and can be rather vague and mild even when the disease progresses into the later stage. The early signs can be really slight that they are misapprehended as normal aches and pains or the symptoms or other illnesses, which makes asbestos-related cancer difficult to detect. If you feel that you are exposed to asbestos-related products, then you need to be aware of the most common symptoms of mesothelioma. Hereunder are some of the essential hints you need to take into account.
When Mesothelioma Symptoms Emerge
The symptoms of mesothelioma and other asbestos cancers first occur in small, subtle ways. Some are really minor that people and their doctors will take them as the symptoms of some other disorder or simply shrug them off entirely. These particularly small signals do not become noticeable to people until twenty to fifty years after the initial exposure to asbestos related products. All of these forms of malignant cancer take even several decades to develop, and the symptoms usually do not make an impact on someone’s life until after the tumors have already begun to spread. Most people that get mesothelioma, of any kind, are diagnosed when the disease has already reached the stage three or four, which are considered as the late stages of the cancer. Even though the decades-long latency or dormancy period is similar to each type, some studies suggest it is shorter for people with the peritoneal form of the cancer. A study conducted in 2011 showed that women had a longer dormancy period than did men.
The early symptoms of mesothelioma are difficult to detect, which makes lots of patients not understand the early symptoms of mesothelioma. They only seek some medical advices when the symptoms get intensified, which is why the majority of research focusing on mesothelioma includes finding better ways to secure earlier diagnosis, when it can be given a more effective treatment. There is actually considerable support for early screening for those that are diagnosed with prolonged occupational exposure to asbestos related products. Another issue in analyzing the symptom is that it is oftentimes misdiagnosed. Non-specialists often mistake the pleural mesothelioma for less severe conditions like pneumonia, COPD, and bronchial infection.
People with peritoneal mesothelioma may be initially diagnosed with ovarian cancer or some syndrome of irritable syndrome. The pericardial mesothelioma is very rare that it can make doctors easily confuse it with heart failure, heart disease, and other more common heart diseases.
What Symptoms Indicate the Spread of Mesothelioma Cancer
Symptoms which indicate the cancer has spread often do not appear to show up in the infected area. The symptoms that are most closely related to local attack of the cancer include the following:
- Dysphagia or the difficulty swallowing
- Superior Vena Cava Syndrome, also known as the obstruction of the vein which returns blood from the upper body to the heart
- Laryngeal nerve palsy
- Horner’s syndrome
- Hypoglycemia or low blood sugar
- Nerve Involvement of the arm
