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Advanced stomach cancer is poorly described as it has spread beyond the stomach lining. Two staging systems accurately describe the status of cancer. Symptoms are often vague, and diagnosis requires medical imaging, blood tests, and a detailed interview. Treatment includes surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and palliative care.
Advanced stomach cancer is cancer that has begun to spread beyond the stomach lining. To say that a cancer is “advanced” is clinically meaningless because it is a poorly descriptive term; a doctor will provide information about the stage of the cancer, to pinpoint how far it has spread. Stomach cancers are often diagnosed at a more advanced stage as patients may experience minimal or vague symptoms when the cancer is isolated in the stomach. As a result, they are more difficult to treat because the cancerous cells are already growing out of control.
Two common staging systems can more accurately describe the status of a cancer. One ranks cancers from zero to five based on their location and level of spread. Higher grades indicate that the cancer has moved beyond the primary organ and into nearby lymph nodes and organs and could be considered advanced cancer. If a stomach cancer is stage three or four, a doctor may call it “advanced stomach cancer.” Stage five cancers have spread to remote areas of the body and are the most advanced.
The TNM staging system assigns a value based on tumor characteristics, lymph node involvement, and metastases. The higher the values for each letter, the more advanced the cancer. Something like a T4N2M0, for example, would be advanced cancer because the tumor is invading nearby structures such as the lungs and metastasizes to regional lymph nodes, although there are no distant metastases like those seen with end-stage cancers.
Patients with advanced stomach cancer may experience upper abdominal pain, nausea, weight loss, fatigue and vomiting. In earlier stages, symptoms are often vague, and the patient may not seek medical attention, or a doctor may miss signs of stomach cancer and pursue other diagnoses before determining that the patient has cancer. Diagnosis usually requires medical imaging, blood tests, and a detailed interview with the patient to gather more information about the symptoms.
Treatments for advanced stomach cancer can include surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Patients who need surgery for gastric cancer can expect some lifestyle changes due to changes in the shape and size of the stomach. They may need to change eating patterns and may require nutritional supplementation to meet their dietary needs. For advanced stomach cancer in the final stages, your doctor may recommend palliative care to slow the growth of the cancer and control pain, with no goal of curing the cancer.
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