–
Photo: CC0 via Pixabay
–
Bladder cancer is too often mistaken for chronic cystitis in women. As a result, they do not receive specialist help as quickly as they should.
That is what urologists Tahlita Zuiverloon and Joost Boormans of the Erasmus MC Cancer Institute say in the run-up to the Bladder Cancer Awareness Month. Bladder cancer affects 7,000 Dutch people every year, a quarter of whom are women.
“At my office hours, I often see women between the ages of 60 and 70 who urinate blood and have taken long-term antibiotics because they thought they had a bladder infection. Valuable time is lost as a result: the tumor is sometimes already advanced, making treatment more difficult,” Zuiverloon warns.
An important first signal of bladder cancer is blood in the urine. “Urine from a bladder cancer patient resembles Roosvicee or red wine,” says Boormans. “A quarter of people who pee blood have urinary tract cancer.”
According to doctors, bladder cancer is number 5 on the list of most common cancers. A majority of 60 percent of patients have smoked or are still smoking.
–
–
