Like other cancers, esophageal cancer has different stages and spread to other parts of the 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 i

Esophageal cancer is similar to other forms of cancer in that it spreads through three different processes. The cancer at the site of its origination is known as the primary cancer. If a cancer spreads or starts to grow somewhere else it is known as the secondary cancer, commonly referred to as metastasis. Cancer cells are not as tightly unified as regular cells and as cancerous cells break off from the tumor they are able to spread to other areas of the body through three modalities. The first is known as local spread where in the cancer starts to grow directly into nearby tissues. The second mode that spreads cancer is through the blood stream. In this process the cancer cells break off of the primary cancer and burrow their way into a blood vessel in order to gain access to the blood stream. The cancer cells flows through the blood stream until it becomes lodged somewhere. Once this happens it will burrow through the wall of typically a capillary and into the tissue of the organ where it has landed. Once this occurs, the cancerous cell begins to multiply and a new or secondary cancerous tumor begins to develop. The third mode of spread is through the lymphatic system, “The way a cancer spreads through the lymphatic system is very similar to the way it spreads through the blood stream. The cancer cell must become detached from the primary tumor. Then it will travel along with the circulating lymph until it gets stuck in the small channels inside a lymph node and begins to grow a secondary cancer” (How 2). One additional problem is micrometastasis which are the spread of cancer but so small as to remain u