Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in men and women behind prostate cancer and breast cancer respectively. Lung cancer is the leading cause of death from cancer worldwide. Every year, more people die from lung cancer than from cancers of the colon, breast, and prostate combined.
10 Symptoms of Lung Cancer
Lung cancer is a silent disease since it does not usually cause symptoms in the early stages. Generally, when the first signs appear, the disease is already advanced. In addition, on many occasions, the symptoms caused by lung tumors are very nonspecific and are misassociated with other diseases.
The following are the 10 main symptoms of lung cancer:
Unexplained weight loss
One of the most frequent symptoms in cancer patients is weight loss, in fact, 60% of patients with lung cancer present this symptom at the time of diagnosis.
Weight loss in patients with lung cancer has a multi-causal origin. On the one hand, there is hypermetabolism, ie an increase in basal energy expenditure, and, on the other, there are several factors that promote substantial loss of appetite, among which is the release of proinflammatory molecules by the tumor such as interleukin -1, interleukin-2 and the tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNFa) that suppress the brain signals that stimulate food consumption.
