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Asked by minimatt to Adam, Joanna, Louise S, Louise W, Marcus on 16 Nov 2012.
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Louise Stanley answered on 16 Nov 2012:
Hi Matt,
It is very difficult to say how long it takes to diagnose cancer as each type of cancer is very different. Often what brings cancer to people’s attention are symptoms such as headaches, nausea, non normal bowel habits or lumps. Cancers originating in tissues on the outside of your body, such as breasts on women and testicles on men tend to be easier to detect as the individual will notice a change or unusual lump. This can then be easily investigated by Doctors. Other cancers, such as ovarian cancer, we don’t have effective/successful screening programs for and being inside the body we therefore can’t feel any changes, so unfortunately most cases of these are diagnosed too late for the patient. Also some cancers can be very aggressive so symptoms will be more obvious where as others develop much more slowly.
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Louise Walkin answered on 18 Nov 2012:
Like Louise S said, it depends on the type of cancer. If we have a screening process, like cervical and breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men then we have much more hope of detecting it. However, most of the time symptoms can be a sure way to make you get anything checked. Women can feel lumps in their breasts, moles can change on our skin, blood in our stools, internal pain or headaches etc would normally make you go to your doctor and get it checked. They can then do blood tests, scans and other tests to determine wht is wrong with you. Doctors also like to do a biopsy where they take a small piece of tissue from where the potential tumour is to determine whether it is a malignant cancer or a benign cancer. If it is malignant it has the potential to spread to other parts of the body and they can normally tell if it has spread by looking at the biopsy. They can then scan the rest of your body to see if any cancer cells have spread. If it is benign they will probably remove it as some benign cancers can turn maignant if they are not removed. Chances are benign tumors will not be life threatening although it depends where they are in the body. I hope that makes sense! 🙂
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Adam Paige answered on 19 Nov 2012:
Louise W mentioned cervical cancer screening (smear tests). These work very well because cancer of the cervix is caused by a virus (human papilloma virus), and before it makes a cancer it causes some visible changes to the cells of the cervix. If these changes are found in a smear test, those cells can be removed by surgery before it can become cancer.
For cancers like that where there is a clear sign of something going wrong that is easy to see before the full cancer appears then it is easy to diagnose and be able to remove the odd cells before it forms a malignant cancer. But many cancers do not show easy to recognise changes before becoming a mallignant cancer. Or in some cases they maybe do show changes but in parts of the body we cannot see.
Lots of research goes into finding ways (special blood tests or MRI scans for example) to improve our ability to diagnose these more difficult to detect tumours. -
Marcus Wilson answered on 20 Nov 2012:
Like everyone says it really does depend on what cancer. most of the techniques we use at themoment are quite mechanical, we look for abnormal cells.
A lot of people are working on quicker and easier tests like blood tests. A blood tets for prostate cancer has been developed that works in minutes, looking at PSA protein. High PSA is only an indication of cancer rather han a cancer specific test. It is really hard as cancer is within the body to find cancer specific things to test.
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