Neuroendocrine Tumors-Symptoms,Causes and Treatment

Cell is the basic unit of life and our body is made up of different types of cells like Red blood cells, white blood cells etc. There are different types of cells and their roles in our human body.

There is one more very important category of cells which is called “Neuroendocrine”.

Role of Neuroendocrine cells in our body

The main feature of neuroendocrine cells is that it has mixed traits of both nerve cells and hormone producing cell. That means on getting nerve signals, it can create hormones into the blood.

What is Neuroendocrine tumour?

Whenever there is any imbalance in the working on neuroendocrine cells, tumors can result and this can cause neuroendocrine tumour too.

A neuroendocrine tumor can also produce hormones in a similar way as these cells do. Neuroendocrine is rare form of tumor and is not mostly found in people frequently. But not all the neuroendocrine tumors produce the hormone and so the symptoms may vary from case to case.

Which Part is affected by Neuroendocrine Tumor?

The most common places in our body where neuroendocrine tumor develops are in the digestive tract, lungs, rectum, colon, pancreases, appendix.

Like any other tumor they can also grow very fast and can be cancerous or non-cancerous. For one’s information, cancerous are called malignant and non-cancerous are also called as benign.

There cure is possible if are localised and  not spread to other parts of body but can be dangerous if spread to other parts of the body also.

Symptoms of Neuroendocrine tumor

Like any other tumor, sometimes it is difficult to see the symptoms associated with  Neuroendocrine tumors. Many times they are not even noticed at first sight.

Some of the common symptoms ares:

1. Feeling a lump inside the skin
2. Tiredness and pale skin
3. Increase in pain due to growing tumor
4. Loss in weight without any specific reason

Treatment of Neuroendocrine Tumor

These tumors can or cannot produce hormones as mentioned above, so the symptoms and so the treatment may vary from one person to another. Treatment of the problem can also depend on the factor how much it has spread in the body.

Different treatment options for the cure of neuroendocrine tumor are:

1. Removing tumor with the help of surgery or surgeries. There could be one or multiple surgery to take out the tumor from the body
2. Chemotherapy can be done for killing the cells. This procedure can damage the healthy cells too as normally very strong drugs are used in chemotherapy
3. If tumor cells are producing a lot of hormones in excess, external medicines can be given to control the growth of excessive hormones
4. Radiation Therapy
5. PRRT- Peptide Receptor Radionuclide