What are the atypical symptoms of lung cancer

There are five main atypical manifestations of lung cancer, involving common symptoms of multiple systems. Since these symptoms seem to have nothing to do with lung cancer, they are often misdiagnosed as other diseases in clinical practice, resulting in delayed treatment.

1. Fever and fatigue: mostly low or moderate fever, a few are high fever, which may be due to the tumor stimulating the body's immune response, accompanied by pneumonia symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath, cough, and sputum. Most of them are obstructive pneumonia caused by tumor obstruction or compression resulting in poor drainage of airway secretions.

2. Painless lumps in the neck, armpits, and chest: Patients seek medical attention because they feel painless lumps. In fact, they are enlarged lymph nodes. This is because lung cancer has the characteristics of metastasis. In the early stage, it can metastasize along the lymphatic channels. The most common site of metastasis is the left supraclavicular lymph nodes. Once metastasis occurs, lung cancer is in the late stage.

3. Bone and joint symptoms in the back, waist, hips, legs and other parts: These are manifestations of tumor cell metastasis to the bones. Most of them are osteolytic lesions, and a few are osteoblastic. They may manifest as bone pain or pathological fractures.

4. Upper limb numbness, arm pain, shoulder and back pain: Lung cancer in the upper lobe or apex of the lung often invades the pleura or ribs, chest wall, soft tissue and shoulder joint upwards, causing shoulder pain or upper arm pain. When invading the brachial plexus, there is often radiating pain in the upper limbs. This early manifestation is easily misdiagnosed as frozen shoulder, etc. Peripheral lung cancer often develops backward and upward, eroding the pleura, involving the ribs and chest wall tissue, and causing shoulder and back pain. This type of patient rarely has respiratory symptoms.

5. Hoarseness: Lung cancer metastasis compresses the laryngeal nerve or metastasizes to the mediastinal lymph nodes to compress the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which can paralyze the vocal cords and cause hoarseness.