1. Watch for Symptoms
If you've already been diagnosed with a primary form of cancer, your doctor has likely already told you about the chance of the disease spreading to adjacent tissues, a process known as metastasis. Bone metastases are relatively common occurrences in advanced-stage cancers, and while your doctor might check for and find them during your medical appointments, there are several symptoms you should be on the lookout for on your own.
Bone pain is the first symptom you're likely to notice. Initially, this pain may come in pulses, appearing then disappearing. But as the cancer spreads, the bone pain will generally become consistent and may interfere with your ability to perform even simple physical activities.<
Fractures and breaks often occur in brittle, cancer-infected bones. If you feel a sudden, sharp pain in a bone, it may be a sign that a cancerous growth just caused the bone to splint, fracture or break. Cancer also frequently spreads to the spinal cord, which can cause compression that might result in numbness in or even paralysis of your lower body and legs.
If you're finding yourself inexplicably nauseous and thirsty but with a pronounced lack of appetite, you may have hypercalcemia. This is a condition caused by the release of bone calcium into your bloodstream, which can happen when a cancerous growth puts pressure on the bone structure. Regardless of the severity of your symptoms, you should immediately report changes in your bones to your doctor and submit to testing.
2. Common Medical-Imaging Tests
Doctors frequently use X-rays to detect changes in your bones that may signal the presence of cancer, and a related procedure called computed topography gives a cross-sectional view. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a similar procedure, but it uses radio waves rather than X-rays to create the picture of your bones.
Your doctor may choose to use a radionuclide bone scan instead of a CT scan, MRI or X-ray. As part of this procedure, you'll be given an injection of a substance that seeps through your entire skeleton, attaching itself to diseased areas in your bones. This technique can also be used to gauge how well you're responding to treatment by checking to see whether the cancerous growths in your bones are shrinking over time.
3. Tissue Tests for Bone Metastases
Your oncologist might choose to target areas where cancerous growths are suspected by using a fine-needle or core-needle biopsy. Both of these procedures draw fluid, bone fragments and/or marrow out of a bone and are usually used when imaging procedures are not yielding conclusive results. A rare variant of this procedure is the surgical biopsy, in which a doctor will perform a procedure to remove a section of the affected bone to test it for cancerous growth. This is an intrusive technique that is only used when necessary.
4. Use a Blood Test to Find Secondary Bone Cancer
If you have cancerous growths in your bones, you may have bone fragments present in your blood or urine. Thus, doctors may use blood or urine tests as a preliminary means of determining whether or not you may be suffering from cancerous metastases.
