…Do you know what the main symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis are?
Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disorder that happens when your immune system is confused and starts attacking your body’s tissue. In contradictory to osteoarthritis, a health condition that causes the wear and tear of joints, rheumatoid arthritis acts by infecting the lining of the joints, causing severe swelling and inflammation.
If it is not properly treated, over time, this can lead to joint damage and bone deterioration. Many people know that any type of arthritis can affect their bone and joint health, but there is some important information they don’t know: the bones and joints aren’t the only body parts that are damaged by rheumatoid arthritis. This health condition is way stronger and it can affect other parts of your body as well.
Here are 9 arthritis symptoms nobody warned you about!
Like with a lot of types of cancer, lung cancer generally doesn’t give any indication that it is present in your body. It doesn’t cause symptoms that you can see or feel that will let you know immediately that it is this type of cancer, and the other symptoms that you may be developing might be very different than what you expect when you think of cancer.
In later stages, you will indeed get some of the symptoms we all envision when we think of lung diseases, like wheezing, chest pain, and the never-pleasing cough. But until you get to these or accompany them, there are a lot of less known side effects that can show up that you may disregard at first glance.
Generally, we are prone to ignoring all types of symptoms until they get really bad, but when these types of reactions can lead to you losing your life, you should definitely not treat them lightly. Obviously, these aren’t just cancer symptoms, but with lung cancer, it is better to know what to look for than to disregard any of these, at times, common symptoms as something trivial.
Keep on reading to find out some of the lesser-known yet important symptoms of lung cancer, and let us know if you knew about them beforehand!
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#1 Lung Cancer’s (or any type of cancer) Dead Giveaway: Weight Change
There are two things that can happen to people who develop small-cell lung cancer (and it stays true for other types of cancer as well).
They can end up developing Cushing’s syndrome, which will make them gain weight because the cancer will convince your body to make too many ACTH hormones, which will raise the level of cortisol in your body. This will lead to a lot of fluid retention and increased and rapid weight gain, along with the fact that you will bruise easily and feel drowsy.
On the other end of the spectrum, you can develop hypercalcemia (a disorder that will make you have way too much calcium in your blood), and SIADH (a hormonal issue that affects your kidneys) will end up making you lose your appetite, which in turn will make you shed pounds like crazy despite you not even trying.
While some may see this as a good thing, drastic and sudden weight changes are never a good sign, and if this sounds like you or someone you know, it is high time you start looking into what is causing this weight fluctuation before it becomes too serious.
#2 Mental Health Issues
We all know that being diagnosed with cancer will end up taking a big toll on your mental health. But what a Danish study has revealed is that there is an actual correlation between cancer and mental health way before you get a diagnosis. Researchers found out that there is an increased risk for people to develop small cell lung cancer if they had gone to see a mental health professional for the first time in that year.
This is because people who have gone to get treated for anxiety, depression, or dementia ended up being diagnosed the same year with this type of cancer. It seems to be because this type of lung cancer directly impacts your hormones or immune system, and it can spread all the way to the brain, messing things up there as well.
Moreover, due to it being very closely linked with high calcium levels, if you aren’t yet diagnosed, these high levels can cause muddled thinking, confusion, and may even trigger depression. It’s not 100% certain that all people who have these mental health issues also have cancer, but it does show that cancer can impact our mental well-being way before we realize we live with the disease.
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#3 Stomach Problems
Almost 2 people out of 10 that have cancer end up developing hypercalcemia, which is a condition that causes you to have very high calcium levels in your blood. This can end up giving you stomach problems, which manifest as painful cramps and belly aches and can make you nauseated or constipated.
This condition can also curb your appetite and make you really thirsty. It may not sound like anything related to lung cancer, but many patients actually end up developing hypercalcemia. Others end up having the tumors make a hormone-like substance that will mess with your kidneys, which in turn can give you more cramps and nausea. It’s something to keep an eye out for, especially if you know you haven’t eaten anything weird lately and if it keeps persisting.
#4 Swollen Breasts in Men
While it is quite rare for lung cancer to cause gynecomastia, it is still a possibility, and it shouldn’t be ignored as it is a symptom. For men who develop large cell lung cancer, their hormonal balance can be thrown off, which in turn will cause the breast tissue to swell and be tender. It may sound funny to some, but it’s a very telling sign that something is definitely off, and men who experience these symptoms should seek medical help immediately.
#5 Being Off-Balance
Small cell lung cancer (which is hard to pinpoint due to all the other side effects it causes) can trick your immune system into attacking your nervous system; this can manifest in your muscles no longer working properly. It can cause you to have difficulty standing up from a seated position or just throw your balance off completely, making you unsteady on your feet.
It can add to your anemia, making you even dizzy. Or you could end up being off-balance and dizzy due to your superior vena cava being blocked; blood wouldn’t effectively travel between your heart and head due to a tumor in your upper right lung, and this can end up causing you way more problems. If your sense of balance starts to be affected, it would be a good idea to go check in with a doctor.
#6 Aching Joints and Weakness
When lung cancer metastasizes (meaning it gets so advanced that it spreads throughout the body), the cancerous cells end up traveling to your bones and through your blood to other parts of your body, where they form new tumors or lesions. They will attack your bones, making them way more fragile and easy to break, as well as generally painful due to the damage they sustain and even cause a mineral imbalance from hypercalcemia or SIADH, which will make you hurt all over and feel overall weak.
If they end up affecting your nervous system, you can end up with weak muscles, which will make everything that we think about every day difficult: even easy tasks like swallowing or even speaking! If you start to feel all your joints aching, or you’re generally getting more aches and sometimes feel weak, you shouldn’t just ignore these symptoms.
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#7 Heart Issues
Hypercalcemia and anemia are two common diseases associated with non-small cell lung cancer that can be developed due to cancer, but even before you can catch them or realize you have them, they can end up affecting your heart: they can cause an irregular or fast heartbeat.
If you have severe anemia, it can cause you to have shortness of breath and even chest pains as a side effect of the tumors. Likewise, severe hypercalcemia will come with heart issues, and it can cause you to have a heart attack and even send you into a coma. If you suspect something is wrong, you should see a specialist as fast as possible so you can prevent any severe reactions.
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#8 Back and Shoulder Pain
Pancoast tumor is a rare type of lung cancer in which small tumors grow in the upper part of your lungs before spreading to your ribs, down all the vertebrae in your spine, to your blood vessels, and even to your nervous system. Because they are so small when compared to other types of tumors and because of where they are located, they rarely end up affecting your respiratory system, which makes them hard to detect.
This type of lung cancer is more likely to cause you pain in your shoulders and upper back, and you can develop pain in your arms and other symptoms way before you’d have any problems with your lungs. This is why you should never ignore these types of pain, as you can never know what could be causing them.
#9 Easily Ignored Lung Cancer Sign: Problems with Your Eyes
Also associated with Pancoast tumors, they can not only localize pain and trouble in your shoulders and back, but they can affect the nerves pretty badly as well. This can end up causing problems with parts of your face and even your eyes! It’s called Horner syndrome, and it can end up causing your eyelids to droop, among other symptoms. You will definitely be tipped off that something is wrong, as another common one is not sweating on that side of your face with the affected eyelid.
This type of small-cell lung cancer may be rare, but it is a slow killer that affects your nervous system pretty badly, and it can be confused with something else, especially since it can give you problems with seeing as well. A good course of action is to go see a specialist when you think that something is wrong and not wait for it to get worse.
#10 Extremely Puffy Face, Neck, or Arm
If there is a tumor on your vena cava, then there is a high chance that it will stop the blood flow as the tumor will end up choking the vein. When that happens, blood from the upper part of your body has nowhere else to go since its normal circulation is obstructed. This is why you should keep an eye out if you have puffy arms, neck, or even face for an extended period of time: these parts of your body will swell from the extra fluid that is just waiting to pass through.
This is a sign of lung cancer that generally ends up being chalked up as something else, but you should be very careful as, even if it’s not this type of cancer, it’s still a sign of a serious health problem. Not to mention, if you observe this type of puffiness and then you also see that the skin on your chest is getting a blue-red tint, you should schedule an appointment with your doctor as soon as possible.
Read more about generally encountered early signs of cancer that you shouldn’t put aside here!
Would You Be Able To Tell If You Had Colon Cancer?
According to the CDC, colon cancer is the third leading cause of cancer deaths among White, Black, and Asian women, right behind breast and lung cancer. While the risk is a bit lower for women, this doesn’t mean they’re not affected.
Colon cancer isn’t the most “glamorous” of cancers if you can even call cancer “glamourous.” I mean, it hasn’t been widely celebrated with ribbons and marches. This is probably because it involves a less-than-appealing part of the body.
So, many people run the other way when it comes to awareness and screening, using not-so-sophisticated but appropriate words like “Ewwww” and “gross.” But while no one wants to talk about it, let’s go over some facts!
Colorectal cancer refers to any cancer that begins in the colon or rectum, making up the large intestine in your gastrointestinal tract. Certain growths or polyps can form in your colon or rectum.
Most are undoubtedly benign, but particular types are at a high risk of becoming cancerous. By this, I mean: sessile serrated polyps, adenomatous polyps, and serrated adenomas.
Hyperplastic polyps and inflammatory polyps usually don’t develop into cancer. With all this, there IS a silver lining! Colon cancer, specifically, is one of the most preventable types of cancer if you catch it early.
So, what are the symptoms?…Keep reading to find out some more about the 10 main ones. But first, how much are YOU at risk?
We are all aware that we shouldn’t be consuming so much sugar, as it is not healthy for us. However, a lot of us forget just how harmful sugar can be to our bodies, especially if we suffer from a sweet tooth or if we happen to find ourselves drinking a lot of sodas or even glasses of those “natural” juices that come in cartons.
Obviously, cutting sugar completely from your diet is virtually impossible, especially with how processed things are these days. But if you happen to be one of those people that ends up indulging more often than not, you should keep on reading to see what actually happens when you get too much glucose into your body! Not only will we take a look at some of the myths, but we will also talk about the long-term effects that eating too many sweet things will have on your body.
Who knows? Maybe this will help you evaluate your eating habits and give you that one last push you need to make some better food choices!
As time has gone on and the medical field has become more and more experienced, so has cancer research evolved as well. There have been many improvements made, and nowadays you can catch cancer in its early stages much more frequently than it was done even a decade ago. Despite this, there are still a lot of early stage cancers that are very hard to detect.
This can happen not only due to the fact that they are in places that are hard to see on normal screenings, but also because they end up giving the patient symptoms or showing signs only when the disease has evolved past its initial stages. When tumors have reached an advanced stage in most of these hard to detect cancers, they can not only be extremely hard to remove, but they can end up spreading around to neighboring organs as well, making tackling them even more difficult.
All of us have seen a blood clot before. It happens every time we accidentally get a paper cut, or when we nick ourselves with a knife or with a razor: the blood congeals and stops the bleeding, only to break up and disappear after the cut has been healed. In such instances, they save the day! However, there are a lot of moments when they become a problem instead of being the hero of the day.
If they don’t end up breaking apart, they can enter your bloodstream and lead to various, dangerous medical conditions. The worst thing is that you can get them virtually anywhere in your body, so knowing the signs of potentially having one can make the difference between saving someone (or yourself) or seeing someone have a stroke in front of you.
Despite the general rumor, you can get blood clots both in your arteries (which are responsible for getting oxygen from your heart to everywhere else in your body, and a blockage can lead to the aforementioned stroke) and in your veins (which bring the blood back to the heart from the body). The only difference between them is that the symptoms show up slower when it comes to the veins, but they are by no means any less troublesome.
We found some of the most common signs you may have a blood clot and categorized them by body part, so they would be easier to spot. This way, you will know when your body is starting to warn you and you can get the medical help you need as fast as possible. But keep in mind that sometimes these clots can be silent problems, as they don’t always cause symptoms.
Either way, we have to warn you that given how serious some of these symptoms are, they’re also common among various medical conditions. You should make an appointment with your doctor if you happen to have any of them!
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Lungs
Similar to other parts of the body (about which we will discuss later), the clots that appear in your lungs aren’t developed in the lung, but rather they have originated elsewhere. In most cases, the clots travel from a deep vein located in your leg or arm after they break off, and that’s how they make it all the way to your lungs.
When the blood clot reaches your lungs, it turns from just being a clot to you developing pulmonary embolism. This is a very dangerous disease as it blocks the blood vessel it ends up in, thus cutting off the blood supply to your lungs. You should be on the lookout for any of the following symptoms, so you know when to go see the doctor: developing pains in your chest or a cough; feeling short of breath or suddenly having problems breathing; feeling dizzy; or beginning to sweat out of the blue.
It’s better to make an extra visit than to be too late!
Brain
Unfortunately, the brain seems to be the place in the body that has the most ways in which blood clots can appear. From them being caused by fatty deposits on the walls of various blood vessels (which are responsible for bringing the blood all the way up to your brain), to them appearing because you got a concussion, and the blow caused a blood clot to appear.
Other times, the clot could travel all the way up to your brain, after forming somewhere else in the body (like the neck or chest, or even in the heart). It just didn’t cause any problems until it used the bloodstream to travel to the brain, where it would cause a stroke! Strokes are very dangerous, and some people never recover from them, not to mention that fainting due to one can cause other types of problems if you fall badly.
This is why you should watch out for these most common symptoms: a general feeling of weakness, problems with your speech or vision, and a seizure.
Heart
There is a chance of a blood clot developing in your heart or anywhere around it. However, if that happens, there’s a high chance of having a heart attack as there won’t be enough blood to pump due to a blockage. You should watch out for sudden sweating, severe pain in your chest or arm, and trouble with breathing. Heart attacks are no joke, and you shouldn’t minimize the symptoms if you have any.
Read more about heart disease symptoms you may be ignoring here!
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Kidney
With how common other types of blood clots are, the ones that happen in the kidneys are less frequently in the memory of people. Yet, this doesn’t make them any less dangerous! If you develop a clot in your kidneys, it might impair your body’s ability to remove toxins and waste from your body. This can lead to you developing high blood pressure and it can even lead to kidney failure.
We don’t have to spell out just how critical it can be to have kidney failure, and with how long the waiting list for a kidney transplant is, you have to keep these signs in mind when considering a blood clot.
The most severe symptoms are blood in your urine, high fevers, and pain in the side of your stomach, thighs, or legs. However, other symptoms might include nausea (often accompanied by vomiting), sudden and severe leg swelling, high blood pressure, and even having trouble breathing. If you notice any of these, even in the slightest capacity, and especially if they’re persisting, you should make a medical appointment as soon as possible.
Stomach area
A less common fact is the one that you can develop blood clots in the veins that are responsible for draining the blood from your intestines. Moreover, they can be caused by various factors, including birth control pills and even other medical conditions such as liver diseases or diverticulitis (which cause inflammation pouches to appear in the intestines).
Because there are so many diseases that cause problems in the stomach area, it can be pretty hard to pinpoint symptoms associated with clots in the stomach. However, you should investigate further if you happen to have any of the following problems: severe belly pain, especially after you just ate, nausea or vomiting, bloody stools; even diarrhea, or feeling bloated for a longer period of time.
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Most common blood clot areas: Arms and Legs
Since we generally nick or hit our legs and arms more often, there is a high chance of a blood clot forming in any of the deep veins that travel all through our limbs than in any other places. When these form, there is a chance that you could have deep vein thrombosis (or DVT), which is what causes the blood clots to form and then travel to your lungs or heart.
Generally, DVT appears after you haven’t moved around for a really long time, during a really long plane trip, or even after surgery. The most common symptoms of having DVT are quite easy to spot if you know them, so if you think any of the following applies to you, get medical help as soon as possible.
It can happen that the area where the blood clot forms swells, or you could see your whole arm or leg starting to swell suddenly. At times, the affected limb might even change color, to red or blue hues, and start itching. Other times, you may notice (and feel) your veins swell, and they may be painful to the touch as a result of the increased pressure.
If you experience any type of persistent pain that is occasionally accompanied by throbbing pain, sudden edema on your skin, or any lower leg cramps that happen over a period of time, there is a high chance you may have DVT.
However, if you start having problems breathing, or if you happen to start coughing up blood, you have to call 911 as soon as possible. This symptom, together with pain in your chest and potential dizzy spells, can mean that the blood clot traveled up to your lungs and you should get help as soon as possible!
Have you ever wondered if you are exhibiting cancer symptoms? Sure, we all fall into the trap of going on Google to search for any sudden symptoms we may exhibit.
The running joke is that anything you happen to search for, Google will tell you that you have cancer in one way or another. If that happens, don’t worry, you most probably have nothing akin to cancer, and it could be something quite minor. Still, you should still see your family doctor to make sure you are alright.)
However, there are quite a lot of cancer symptoms that are so common that many of us end up ignoring them. It’s counterintuitive to ignore some of these symptoms, but we cannot help but either confuse them with something else or think that they are normal, when in reality they are anything but.
We have gathered some of the most common cancer symptoms that most people don’t pay attention to, so you too can be in the know about sudden changes that need your attention as soon as possible!
