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Patients who present to the emergency department with apparently minor complaints often are worried about cancer. To examine the association between first occurrences of four alarm symptoms — hematuria, hemoptysis, dysphagia, and rectal bleeding — and a subsequent diagnosis of cancer, researchers retrospectively reviewed 5 years of data from the U.K. General Practice Research Database for more than 760,000 patients without cancer history from 128 general practices.
Of 11,138 first occurrences of hematuria, 472 cases in men and 162 in women were associated with new urinary tract cancer. Of 4822 occurrences of hemoptysis, 220 cases in men and 81 in women were associated with new respiratory tract cancer. Of 6003 occurrences of dysphagia, 150 c…