Nearly 10,000 people die from stomach cancer in Vietnam every year, mainly due to late diagnosis, Vietnam News Agency quoted a doctor as saying Friday.

Nearly 10,000 people die from stomach cancer in Vietnam every year, mainly due to late diagnosis, Vietnam News Agency quoted a doctor as saying Friday.

At a meeting on the disease held in Hanoi that day, Dr. Nguyen Tuyet Mai, chief of internal medicine at the Hanoi-based K Hospital, said that over 13,000 people are diagnosed with stomach cancer in Vietnam every year .

The disease is ranked third out of the ten most common dangerous cancers in Vietnam, she stressed.

Professor Nguyen Ba Duc, vice chairman of the Vietnam Association of Cancer, agreed, saying that three-fourth of patients are diagnosed when their disease has already reached the last stages, so treatment is no longer very effective.

Meanwhile, Vietnam still struggles to make accurate diagnosis and offer effective surgeries, especially at health clinics and hospitals in provinces and districts, VNA reported.

Therefore, experts at the meeting called on people to seek treatment as soon as they have any symptoms, including digestive disorders, stomach bleeding, and vomiting, according to the news source.

VNA also quoted the World Health Organization as saying that around one million new cases of stomach cancer are recorded around the world every year. Some 800,000 people from across the world die from stomach cancer every year.

The rate in the Asia is higher than the Europe. Asian cases of stomach cancer account for about two-third of global cases, according to the WHO.

The Asian countries with the highest rates of stomach cancer are China, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam.