Local Symptoms Of Cancer

Unusual lumps or swelling (tumor), hemorrhage (bleeding), pain and/or ulceration. Compression of surrounding tissues may cause symptoms such as jaundice.
Systemic symptoms

Weight loss, poor appetite and cachexia (wasting), excessive sweating (night sweats), anemia and specific paraneoplastic phenomena, i.e. specific conditions that are due to an active cancer, such as thrombosis or hormonal changes.
Symptoms of metastasis (spreading)

Enlarged lymph nodes, cough and hemoptysis, hepatomegaly (enlarged liver), bone pain, fracture of affected bones and neurological symptoms. Although advanced cancer may cause pain, it is often not the first symptom.

Breast cancer is a malignant (cancerous) tumor that starts from cells of the breast. The disease occurs mostly in women, but men can get breast cancer too. The information here refers only to breast cancer in women.

A woman’s breast is made up of glands that make breast milk (lobules), ducts (small tubes that carry milk from the lobules to the nipple), fatty and connective tissue, blood vessels, and lymph (pronounced limf) vessels. Most breast cancers begin in the cells that line the ducts (ductal cancer), some begin in the lobules (lobular cancer), and the rest in other tissues.

Which is more likely to give you lung cancer, inhaling polluted city air every day, or smoking a pack of cigarettes a day?

According to a telephone survey taken by American Cancer Society researchers, most of us either think pollution is more likely to cause lung cancer than smoking — or don’t know which is worse. Unfortunately, either answer is completely at odds with decades of scientific evidence that cigarette smoking is the number one cause of lung cancer by far.

Stage 4 Cancer

The stage of a cancer is a descriptor (usually numbers I to IV) of how much the cancer has spread. The stage often takes into account the size of a tumor, how deep it has penetrated, whether it has invaded adjacent organs, if and how many lymph nodes it has metastasized to, and whether it has spread to distant organs.

Staging of cancer is important because the stage at diagnosis is the most powerful predictor of survival, and treatments are often changed based on the stage.

Cancer

Cancer is a disease characterized by disorderly division of cells, combined with the malignant behavior of these cells. Malignant cancer cells tend to spread, either by by implantation into distant sites by metastasis (the process whereby cancer cells can move through the bloodstream or lymphatic system to distant locations), or direct growth into adjacent tissue through invasion .

Most cancers can be treated and some cured, depending on the specific type, location, and stage. Once diagnosed, cancer is usually treated with a combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Cancer may affect people at all ages, but risk tends to increase with age. It is one of the principal causes of death in developed countries.