Are all the different cancers really that different or is it all just cancer and we just specify where it formed?
In: Biology
Cancer is when 2 things in a cell break. One is the part that controls growth, that part has to break in a way that makes the growth go out of control. The other is the part that controls something called apoptosis, which is a process where a cell that is malfunctioning will actually kill itself to protect the organism as a whole. When both of these things break, the cell multiplies out of control and won’t kill itself, and this is cancer. However, since this can happen in almost any cell in your body, and there are a myriad of ways those processes can break, different cancers have wildly different characteristics and may need wildly different treatments to be dealt with. Cancer cells that started off as bone marrow tissue are going to behave very different from cancers that started off as lung tissue.
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