Sorry if the flair is wrong. Biology or chemistry?
In: Biology
Small amounts of radiation can cause changes in DNA that turns off the natural programmed cell death and causes uncontrolled growth as a tumour. Larger doses targeted on a specific area causes so much damage to the cells that they die.
Chemotherapy generally locks into DNA and prevents replication. That has a greater effect on fast reproducing cells like tumours (and hair follicles) than it does on the rest of the body.
Together the radiation kills the tumour and chemo mops up anything left, particularly if mutant cells have moved into other parts of the body.
Cancer is caused when a single ray of radiation hits your DNA, causes a bad mutation, and sets off a chain of events of monstrous proportions.
Cancer is treated with fatal doses of radiation that destroy DNA. They are causing damage on a large scale, turning the recipe for life into alphabet soup. I don’t know this term is scientifically correct in terms of the energy level — this radiation bombardment cooks the cancer cells.
Doesnt radiation cause cancer? Yes, in low doses and at a low rate of probability. Only very specific mutations can lead to cancer. In most cases the damage is discovered and repaired. Or the change is not “perfect sabotage” to make the cell go out of control. Most cells know when they are very sick; they literally ask to be killed.
For example, you could go to friends computer and install spyware. This is like cancer. If you go and wipe out his hard drive, his computer won’t boot and definitely your spyware won’t do anything. It’s dead, too.
Radiation can kill cells just by the sheer amount of damage it causes. But it can also damage DNA in a way that doesn’t cause the cell to die, but repair itself. In some cases, the radiation damages a certain gene that encodes for something important. For example, your cells have genes called tumour-suppressor genes which actively stop cells from becoming cancerous. If they get hit by the radiation and damaged, then the cell begins to develop in a way that leads to cancer.
Chemotherapy is toxic to your body and kills cells that replicate quickly. Cancer cells are like this, but also skin and cells that line your gut. They interfere with normal cell division so faster dividing cells are more impacted than slower dividing cells.
Chemoradiotherapy is combining the two in certain cancers to achieve the effect of the two. Targeted radiotherapy can wipe out a large mass which makes it easier to remove surgically, but there might be remnant cells that aren’t visible to the eye that are far from the mass. The hope is that chemotherapy will kill those cells as well and cure you from cancer.
Most times, radiation doesn’t change a cell to be cancerous. Almost every time you get hit by a piece of ionizing radiation, the cell that gets hit doesn’t turn cancerous, it just dies. The issue is in that 1% of the time that it does turn cancerous, and that only needs to happen once.
Radiation therapy though, kills those cells, and if they turn more cancerous, then it doesn’t really matter, they’re already cancer. It doesn’t hit other parts of the body, like “cancer causing” radiation.
So, it can’t be used to treat all sorts of cancer. But many forms of cancer are a result of cells with damaged or mutated DNA that causes them to reproduce and grow and act in a way they’re not supposed to. Ionizing radiation (radiation that has enough energy to knock out electrons from atoms) causes damage to cells and their DNA – this damage can be enough to outright kill the cells (how it works with treatment), or it might just cause damage that causes mutations and those mutations in turn can result in cells growing into cancerous growths.
Radiation therapy is aimed at hurting/killing the cancer cells themselves, but it also affects healthy cells in that immediate area, too. It absolutely can cause other tissue damage or other serious side effects.
“Chemotherapy” is any sort of chemical treatments meant to target cancer cells – could be creams, certain pills, implanted discs that dissolve and release medication or injections/IVs of medication. It’s usually used in combination with other treatments (surgery, radiation, etc.) to help suppress the growth of the cancer cells. But this too is often hazardous to other cells, because, like radiation therapy, there’s no way for it to tell the difference between normal healthy cells and dangerous cancer cells.
Radiation damages the DNA in cells. At smaller doses this causes mutations, which can lead to cancer. At high doses it flat out kills cells, especially cells that are in the middle of reproductions. This is why radiation poisoning causes hair loss and nausea, it killed the fast-growing cells in your hair follicles and stomach.
When used for cancer treatment, you’re using targeted high doses to kill cells that are already cancerous and dividing rapidly. It’s a way of killing off cancer cells that can’t be removed via surgery. Nearby cells can theoretically mutate and spawn their own cancers but that’s a relatively low risk compared to the risk of having an active tumour right now.
Chemo also targets cells that are in the midst of dividing/replicating…this tends to be cancer, so it preferentially targets cancer and other fast-growing cells. Hence why chemo has similar side effects to radiation.
Together, they’re two different mechanisms to kill fast-multiplying cells that can be more effective than either method alone.
Think of it like this. There are 100 cells. 90 are good. 10 are cancer. Radiation is going in with a ln accurate but still damaging machine gun. You kill 8 cancers and kill 2 civilians. Acceptable losses. Now there are only 2 cancers and 88 good ones. Next round of radiation, you user a sniper rifle. Hit 1 cancer and only injure 1 civilian. Still acceptable losses.
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