Bladder tumours difficult to treat

Doctors at  treat a patient with a bladder tumour (Photo courtesy of the hospital)

HCM City (VNS/VNA) – Eighty percent of bladder
tumours are cancerous and difficult to treat, according to Dr Nguyen Hoang Luong
of the urological endoscopy department at Binh Dan Hospital in HCM City.

Many hospitals in the country including Binh Dan Hospital have seen more and
more patients with bladder tumours.  

The hospital each month admits 60 to 80 patients with
bladder tumours which have not yet spread to muscles, Luong said.

More than 1,000 new cases of are
diagnosed in Vietnam every year. Around half of the patients die due to the
disease.

According to Luong, the development of diagnostic imaging and
pathology has helped detect more and more incidences of bladder tumours.

To treat bladder tumours, many hospitals such as Binh
Dan Hospital use lasers and chemotherapy.

The hospital conducted a study on use lasers and
chemotherapy to treat 68 patients with from 2014 to 2016.
The study showed that effectiveness and safety in treatment was high. Only
10 of them experienced a tumour reoccurrence.

In the study, more than 79 percent of them were male and aged
between 51 and 70. Seventy-two of the male patients had a history of
smoking.  The common symptom among these patients was blood in urine.
The hospital’s doctors said the average size of the tumour was nearly 19
milimetres and the number of tumours in each person ranged from one
to three.

Dr Nguyen Phuc Cam Hoang, the hospital’s deputy director,
told Vietnam News: “The cancer does not have any specific symptoms and are the
same as infections in the bladder or kidney or kidney stones: blood in urine.”

If patients have blood in their urine and are treated but do
not recover within two months, they should go to specialised hospitals for
examination and treatment, he said. Doctors should then prescribe tests for
bladder cancer, he said.

Health experts said that people who smoke have four
times higher risk of bladder cancer than . People whose
work involves chemicals are at a higher risk./.