Gall bladder cancer is an uncommon cancer, a condition in which cancer (malignant) cells are found in the tissues of the gall bladder.
As you all know that gall bladder is a pear-shaped organ that lies just under the liver in the upper abdomen.
Gall bladder stores the bile, a fluid made by the liver. The bile duct that connects the gall bladder and liver to the first part of the small intestine releases bile. The bile helps to digest fat.
Believe It Or Not! Gall bladder cancer is more common in women than in men. It is also more common in people who have hard clusters of material in their gall bladder like gallstones.
Being female and being Native American can increase the risk of developing gall bladder cancer.
Researchers believe that DNA in the cells of your biliary tract may be damaged by toxins that are routinely metabolized by your liver, although the exact cause of gall bladder and bile duct cancers isn’t clear.
These toxins are released into bile so that they can be eliminated from your body. But if bile empties more slowly than normal, it increases the amount of time your cells are exposed to cancer-causing substances (carcinogens).
How to Detect? Possible signs of gall bladder cancer include jaundice, pain, and fever. Other symptoms may be caused by gall bladder cancer or any other conditions.
- Nausea and vomiting.
- Bloating.
- Lumps in the abdomen.
As with many tumor types, management is often a multidisciplinary approach involving a variety of treatments.
The only truly curative treatment is the total surgical removal of all known tumor. Unfortunately, only about 25% of patients with gall bladder cancer are able to undergo definitive surgery.
As the surgery will be very complicated only a specialist who has dealt with such cases in the past should be consulted for proper treatment. As you might expect, such a surgery carries a high risk of serious operative injury.
Even when surgery is possible, the surgeon is usually unable to take very large resection margins around the tumor, meaning that cancer cells still exist around the incision portion.
In such cases, external beam radiation therapy can be used in hopes of eradicating any microscopic cancer remaining in the surgical area and surrounding at-risk regions.
It is revealed that in the United States Gall bladder cancer causes about thousands of deaths per year.
Internationally a considerable variation exists in the incidence of gall bladder cancer throughout the world. Areas with high incidence rates include Chile, Japan. Spain and India, Bolivia and Israel have low incidence rates.
