Doctors at Bình Dân Hospital treat a patient with a bladder tumour. Photo courtesy of the hospital

HCM CITY— Eighty per cent of bladder tumours are cancerous and difficult to treat, according to Dr Nguyễn Hoàng Luông of the urological endoscopy department at Bình Dân Hospital in HCM City.

Many hospitals in the country including Bình Dân 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, Luông said.

More than 1,000 new cases of urinary bladder cancer are diagnosed in Việt Nam every year. Around half of the patients die due to the disease.

According to Luông, 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 Bình Dân Hospital use lasers and chemotherapy.

Bình Dân Hospital conducted a study on use lasers and chemotherapy to treat 68 patients with bladder tumours 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 per cent 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 Nguyễn Phúc Cẩm Hoàng, the hospital’s deputy director, told Việt Nam 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 non-smokers. People whose work involves chemicals are at a higher risk.VNS