5 ways to test yourself for cancer

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

How to notice signs of illness with a mirror and scales.

Cancer (after cardiovascular diseases) is the second leading cause of death in the world. Many cancers can be treated well if noticed early. It doesn't take much for that.

What should be done

1. Take a good look at yourself

In Russia, according to the Herzen Moscow Cancer Research Institute, most often neoplasms appear on the skin. Of all such cases, 14, 2% are due to malignant melanoma - one of the most aggressive tumors.

Melanomas are most often disguised as ordinary moles, but the neoplasm differs from normal tissue and can still be found. Therefore, if you regularly examine the body, study moles and suspicious age spots, then the chance to notice skin cancer at an early stage, when treatment is most effective, increases.

How to get tested for skin cancer

Perform the examination after a shower or bath, in a room with good lighting.

1. Take off your clothes and stand in front of a full-length mirror, but if not, any will do. Examine moles on your face, neck, chest, and abdomen. Women need to lift their breasts and examine the skin underneath. Examine the skin in your armpits, the back of your hands, and the space between your fingers.
2. Sit down and examine your legs from all sides, not forgetting about your toes. Take a small mirror in your hands and look at the back of your legs: under the knees, on the back of the thigh.
3. Using the same mirror, examine the buttocks and examine the groin area - a neoplasm can even appear on the skin of the genitals.
4. Stand with your back to the large mirror and examine your back while looking into the small one.

Such checks are recommended by oncologists once a month. Then the skin will be under control.

What should be alarming:

• A mole or spot is more than 6 mm in diameter.
• A neoplasm with uneven, blurred edges.
• A mole or spot that is unusual in color, such as red or partially blackened.
• Any mass that protrudes above the surface of the skin.

There are many skin cancers, they look different. Therefore, it is advisable to show everything that itches, gets wet, bleeds and flakes to a doctor.

2. Check weight

Many cancers develop imperceptibly: cancer is already there, but it does not make itself felt either by pain or by any special symptoms. And not everyone pays attention to ordinary ailments: why run to the doctor because of fatigue, when it is already clear that you need a vacation?

One of the signs of cancer is weight loss, provided that the diet and lifestyle have not changed.

Most often, cancer of the stomach, pancreas, esophagus or lungs declares themselves this way.

Of course, it's not just cancer that is losing weight. That is why you need to weigh yourself regularly in order to know when changes in body weight are justified, and when you should consult a doctor and find out where the kilograms have gone.

3. Make a genetic analysis

The predisposition to many types of cancer is hereditary, and genetic testing helps to identify mutations that increase the risk. It makes sense to go for tests if someone in the family already had cancer.

For example, the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes influence the development of breast cancer. If such a person is found, it becomes clear that he is at risk.

A “bad” gene is not a disease yet. This is just a signal that shows that you need to be attentive to your health and not overlook suspicious ailments.

4. Get a mammogram

Mammography is an examination of the mammary glands using X-rays. Women are advised to have mammography on a regular basis after 40-45 years, and after 50 years to do it once a year or two. It is pointless and even harmful to check before these age limits. The more often the test is done, the higher the risk of a false positive result. And this, in turn, leads to unnecessary research and operations.

It is harmful to look for seals in the chest on your own.

According to observations, self-diagnosis does not help to find breast cancer at an early stage. But it makes you needlessly worry if something suddenly "seemed", and to treat cases that do not require it (here we mean neoplasms that pass by themselves).

Men also have breast cancer, albeit infrequently. Therefore, it is enough to pay attention to unpleasant symptoms: pain or induration in the chest, any discharge from the nipples or a change in their shape.

5. Calculate how much you smoke

Lung cancer is one of the three most common types of cancer, but smokers are most often affected by it. Even those who quit smoking less than 15 years ago are at risk. An important condition for the development of lung cancer is the number of cigarettes that a potential patient smokes.

To estimate the chances of getting sick, you can use the smoker's index. The number of cigarettes per day is multiplied by the number of years of tobacco use and divided by 20. If the indicator is more than 25, the person is a heavy smoker. This means that the risks of getting sick are growing. It is necessary to do additional examinations.

By the way, to detect lung cancer, they use not fluorography, on which nothing is really visible, but computed tomography.

What not to do

1. Diagnose yourself. Reading a list of symptoms on Wikipedia is perfectly fine. But after such a search, conclusions cannot be drawn. Our job is to spot warning signs. And let the specialists make the diagnosis after examinations and analyzes.
2. Donate blood for tumor markers. These tests are necessary for patients in whom the diagnosis has already been confirmed, because in healthy people the result may be false positive. For example, due to the inflammatory process. With the help of tumor markers, the dynamics of treatment is monitored. For this, the study is repeated and the results are compared. A one-time analysis will not provide useful information.
3. Conduct MRI, ultrasound and other examinations, if there is no reason. It is not for nothing that all diagnostic procedures are prescribed only after symptoms have appeared. It is pointless to examine a healthy person without complaints: the doctor simply does not know what to look at. And studying every square centimeter of the insides is ineffective, since there is a high risk of missing something dangerous. Or find something unimportant and start to heal it intensively.

Don't look for disease where it doesn't exist. Cancer is really better to detect in the early stages, but the main thing is not to overdo it in the search.