What are the symptoms of bladder cancer?
Bladder cancer per se, generally does not have any symptoms. This is one of the reasons that it's under-diagnosed, and sometimes not diagnosed early enough. The usual presenting symptom of bladder cancer is referred to as painless hematuria. Hematuria means blood in the urine. It is painless, as opposed to other causes of blood in the urine, or hematuria, that are associated with passage of a stone, or infections where there's usually pain, discomfort, burning, or pressure symptoms. Patients with bladder cancer use the restroom as they would normally, and happen to notice that there might be some blood in the urine. Fortunately, bladder cancer tends to bleed early - it's thought to be due to the fact that it's a very vascular tumor with a lot of new blood vessels growing, and also because during urination, the bladder contracts pretty forcefully, and that filling contraction tends to promote bleeding. Most patients do tend to notice some bleeding early in the course of the disease. The downside of the fact that other than the bleeding there's no symptom with it, is that the bleeding generally is not persistent, in other words you can see some blood one day and not the other. That's one of the reasons that the diagnosis of bladder cancer, especially in women, is sometimes delayed - because the blood disappears, they assume it was nothing or just a little broken blood vessel, or maybe some menstrual bleeding interspersed with it. Since it disappears, they don't pursue it through their family physician.
