Common symptoms of critical illness of lung cancer

The early symptoms of lung cancer are not obvious. Once the symptoms of lung cancer are critical, it means that the disease has entered the middle and late stages. At this time, the treatment is difficult and the prognosis is poor. Everything depends on striving for symptomatic treatment, comprehensively alleviating the symptoms of lung cancer, improving the patient's quality of life, and prolonging life.

The critical symptoms of lung cancer are very obvious, including pain, hoarseness, facial and neck edema, shortness of breath, hemoptysis, fever, extrapulmonary metastasis symptoms and a series of late-stage physical signs. Pain usually occurs in the chest and upper limbs. The pain of lung cancer is very severe and requires strong analgesics to relieve. Hoarseness is caused by the invasion of the lung tumor on the left side of the mediastinum and compression of the throat nerves. When the tumor invades the right side of the mediastinum, it compresses the superior vena cava, causing poor jugular vein return and causing facial and neck edema. The tumor invades the pleura, causing pleural effusion. When the amount is large, it causes shortness of breath, which is also one of the critical symptoms of advanced lung cancer.

In addition, because part of the lung tissue loses its respiratory function due to the growth of the tumor, the respiratory function of the whole lung is impaired, resulting in respiratory discomfort, which can be felt even when resting in critical condition. There are many metastatic symptoms in critical lung cancer patients, and the common metastatic sites are bones, liver, brain, kidneys, adrenal glands, subcutaneous tissue, etc. The clinical symptoms vary with the metastatic sites, such as jaundice, pleural effusion, weight loss, and cachexia.

The critical symptoms of lung cancer greatly reduce the quality of life of critically ill patients. Reasonable and effective treatment methods should be adopted to alleviate the condition and improve the quality of life of patients. In addition, the family members of lung cancer patients should give them spiritual support and encouragement to strengthen their confidence and defeat lung cancer.