What are the Symptoms of Mesothelioma?

What are the Symptoms of Mesothelioma? - If you've had any exposure to asbestos, you may feel fine for about twenty years before you start suffering the symptoms of mesothelioma. This latency period can make it difficult for both the patient and the doctor in terms of treating the disease before it surfaces. When asbestos symptoms do finally appear, the treatment options are severely limited, and can make the disease difficult to deal with.

The symptoms of asbestos exposure include:

• weight loss
• loss of appetite
• coughing
• fluid in the lungs
• shortness of breath
• pain in the chest
• difficulty swallowing
• unable to sleep

These are only the most common mesothelioma symptoms, and can vary between patients. Having difficulty breathing is the most common mesothelioma symptom that brings a patient to a doctor's office. However, at this stage, it can be too late. This breathing problem is caused by tumors that have grown in the pleural cavity of the chest. This makes it hard for the lungs to expand when you inhale. This can be a painful experience, but thankfully, medicine is designing tests that can catch the disease and its symptoms at earlier stages, making treatment options more readily available to sufferers.

There are different kinds of mesothelioma, depending on which area of the chest is affected. These categories each carry their own symptoms of asbestos exposure. There is pleural, pericardial, and peritoneal mesothelioma. Pleural mesothelioma is the most common kind, as described earlier. Tumors form within the chest cavity that make it difficult for the lungs to fully expand, which causes the body to not get enough oxygen into the blood.

Pericardial mesothelioma is the rarest kind of cancer caused by asbestos, and causes fluid to collect around the heart, making it difficult for the organ to do its job properly. Some of the mesothelioma symptoms of this kind are:

• chest pain
• heart palpitations
• shortness of breath
• persistent coughing

Peritoneal mesothelioma, on the other hand, is a tumor that develops along the lining of the abdominal cavity. Because of its location, it is also referred to as abdominal mesothelioma. It's difficult to tell how asbestos gets into this area of the body, but some doctors theorize that asbestos fibers travel through the lymphatic system to the abdominal lining, or that the fibers enter the intestinal tract through ingestion. 

Symptoms of mesothelioma of this kind include:

• swelling of the abdominal region
• loss of appetite
• bowel obstruction
• nausea
• fever
• anaemia

The typical treatments for any kind of mesothelioma are surgery to remove the tumors, radiation therapy, or chemotherapy. Which option to go with is entirely dependent on where the disease is located and how far along it is. Some noninvasive surgery can also be done to remove the fluid that are collecting in the lungs or around the heart. This makes it much easier for the organs to do their jobs more efficiently.

These symptoms are unpleasant and sometimes painful for a person to deal with. It can sometimes make life feel unbearable at times. However, with the medical breakthroughs being made, these asbestos symptoms can be diminished or eliminated altogether, with the right treatment and catching the disease early.

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