Are all the different cancers really that different or is it all just cancer and we just specify where it formed?
In: Biology
[deleted]
Calling cancer “cancer ” is kinda like saying you broke a computer. You didn’t describe in anywhere near enough detail. how you did it. What broke? How severe? Is the damage widespread? Did we figure it was broken before it became catastrophic?
I had stage 4 leukemia, which isn’t anywhere close to describing what happened to me. The actual disease i had was described to me as “burkitts cell leukemia, cns positive” while the leukemia portion was labeled “acute lymphoblastic” every single word in those phrases alone is serious and combined together is practically a death sentence with the exception of one word: burkitts. My version of leukemia, while severe and very insanely deadly if left untreated, had a 90 percent survival rate if treated. I was a healthy man, cancer free, less than a year after diagnosis. The diseases all describe the generic issue of defective cells’ DNA causing them to replicate out of control, but *how* they do that is a completely different matter all together.
Other people have already fairly well explained the different cancers. Here’s how I conceptualize them:
They are about as unique as people. What I mean by that, is that the outline is the same, and the devils lie in the details. All humans are born the same way, as are cancers (sexual reproduction is to humans as damaged, unchecked replicating DNA is to cancer). The type of cancer a specific cancer is, is like a personality is to a person. You remove the personality/type of cancer, and you have mostly identical things. Humans: a walking, talking, bipedal hominid with 5 fingers/toes on each hand and foot. Cancer is a broken gene sequence that cannot stop self-replicating and eventually sucks away all the bodies vitamins and other nutrients.
Cars can break down in different ways. On the surface they are still not okay to drive. But the specific type of broken can vary. It may be the starter. It may be the brakes. It may be the fuel pump. All are unique but the result is the same. Sort of like that.
Cells in different parts or systems of the body go haywire. Which systems and the means by which they break determines severity and treatability.
Fundamentally all cancers are the same in that they are cells multiplying uncontrollably, however they type of cell the cancer forms from, as well as where it’s located can dramatically affect options for treatment. As such cancers tend to be classified by these two properties. Also different cells have different risks for turning cancerous which affects screening procedures. And even then the way a cell becomes cancerous might be different. There’s a lot of different things that can go wrong even in the same type of cell.
As such it’s worth treating them all individually.
Grouping them all together is kindof like saying all bacterial infections are the same. On one level yes, but on another level definitely not.
They really are different. Cells can grow out of control (this is what causes cancer) due to many possible defects, which could cause their growth to be different. And they’re different types of cells in the first place which has a very big effect too.
Cancers spread and need to be treated differently and this isn’t just because of where they’re located. We will never have “a cure for cancer” because of this— it’s not one disease likely to have one cure. At the same time, we have good or excellent treatments for certain types of cancer, so there are “cures” out there and more being developed all the time.
There are known gene mutations that drive cancer and make them unique to each person. Treatments approved for specific gene mutations as well. Yes they are really that different.
The real question is, are all cancers different forms of cell mutation? Therefore not really curable just killable and preventable
They are not all the same. Cancers in glands can either cause run-away abnormal hormone production or shut off hormone production. Also, cancers have been known to form from cells of other parts of the body lodging in some other part of the body and becoming cancerous or gene expression gone wrong. Carl Zimmer’s book on gene expression, *She has her mother’s laugh*, explained how there was one instance of a woman with a cancer in her lung that wasn’t lung cancer, but some other cancer (I think it was liver cancer, I forget). The problem with this is that one type requires a treatment that doesn’t work on the other, and the treatment she was getting as killing her and not helping with the cancer. Only a genetic test to see what part of the genome is being expressed can diagnose these cancers early.
In light of this known possibility, where a cancer is formed is not necessarily even the same as where it is expressed.
Cancer cells behave in their own interest rather than in the interest of the organism. Their behavior can be analogized to a Mac having a hardware fault booting up in Kernel Panic mode. It can still boot, but its higher functions are inaccessible. The theory that proposes this model for the behavior of cancer has it that all our cells have the code, so to speak, of primitive single cells that multiply and spread to serve their own interest, and when enough damage is done to a cell, its higher functions that let it behave in the interest in the organism no longer work, so the cell reverts to this primitive multiply-and-spread behavior of bacteria and amoebas, treating the body like a collection of micro-environment to colonize and adapt to, regardless of what harm it does to the body as an organism. But since this is the outcome of damage, and there are so many ways cells can be damaged to the point of going cancerous, you can’t just characterize them all as being the same. The only commonality seems to be run-away growth not ordered in the matter of the cells of the tissue that the cells come from.
See this essay that explains this perspective:
[The Problem with the Mutation-Centric View of Cancer](http://nautil.us/blog/the-problem-with-the-mutation_centric-view-of-cancer)
Different. At uni they threw us the estimate that cancer is really over 200 different diseases. Its a big part of why it’s so hard to cure or more specifically why curing all of them is difficult.
There are 6-10 basic conditions that need to be met to get a metastatic cancer. But any pathway of mutations that achieve this is fair game. Add on top of that the difference in individuals genetics, different tissues of origin and you start to see how they could be so different.
There are similarities though. The gene p53 is known as the guardian of the genome because in almost every cancer it’s functioning is perturbed in some manner, whether directly or indirectly.
Latest Answers