body. Typical symptoms of esophageal cancer, which is often difficult to detect in its early stages, include one or more of the following: difficulty swallowing, vomiting blood, heartburn, drooling, breath door, regurgitation of food, chest pain unrelated to eating, weight loss. There are tests and signs that physicians use to detect the presence of esophageal cancer, including evidence of occult blood in stool, an EGD (esophagogastroduodenoscopy) and biopsy, a barium swallow, and a chest MRI or thoracic CT. When esophageal cancer is first diagnosed, tests are performed in order to demonstrate whether the cancer has moved to other parts of the body or has remained local. This is where staging of cancer comes to play a role. Staging is significant because “it tells the specialist how best the cancer should be treated. If a cancer is just in one place, then a local treatment such as surgery or radiotherapy could be enough to get rid of it completely. A local treatment treats only part of the body. If a cancer has spread, then local treatment alone will not be enough. A systemic treatment will be needed. Systemic means treating the whole body. Chemotherapy and immunotherapy are systemic treatments because they circulate throughout the body in the blood stream” (The Stages 1).
Most cancers, including esophageal cancer, have staging systems that have been formulated in order to provide physicians and specialists with a common language in regard to tumors, so that tumor treatment is accurate, and so treatment guidelines are standardized. There are two main types of staging systems that describe the size and type of tumors and whether they have spread or remained local. The first system is the TNM system and the second is the number system. TNM represents Tumor, Node and Mestasis. In the TNM staging system, numbers are used to describe the cancer:
T can be 1-4, with 1 being a small tumor and 4 a large one
N can b...