• Question: do all cancers have the same symptons or do they vary

    Asked by orlaigh on 21 Jun 2023.
    • Photo: Annabel Black

      Annabel Black answered on 21 Jun 2023:

      No not all cancers have the same symptoms – some have no symptoms at all. This means the tumours can grow pretty big before the patient might feel unwell. There are some common symptoms across different cancer types like feeling a lump or a growth or feeling very very tired all of the time (this is often caused by our immune system trying to fight off the cancer cells). Depending on which place the cancer is growing in the body there might be some common symptoms for patients – for example lung cancer patients might feel short of breath and coughing all of the time or brain cancer patients often go to the doctors with very severe headaches that don’t go away. It really depends on where the tumour is growing and what kind of cancer it is.

    • Photo: Jean Ling Tan

      Jean Ling Tan answered on 22 Jun 2023:

      There are some generic symptoms that would lead healthcare professionals to suspect cancer, these are quite non-specific e.g. unexplained weight loss, loss of appetite/feeling full earlier than usual and persistent tiredness. Most cancers will have symptoms specific to where the cancer comes from, for example persistent headaches for brain tumours, a breast lump for breast cancer, a persistent cough for lung cancer or difficulty swallowing for oesophageal cancer. Of course it doesn’t mean that if someone has any of these symptoms that they defininitely have cancer and some cancers have no symptoms at all, like Annabel said.

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