I hope this question makes sense. I read where high levels of radiation exposure can cause cancer, but if that is the case, how does radiation treatments cure cancer? Thank you for reading.
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Radiation causes cancer by inducing mutations in the DNA. High energy radiation strikes the DNA strand, and depending on the energy level can cause a change in the DNA, or if the radiation is strong enough it can break the strand entirely.
Radiation treatment works by bombarding the cells with so much high energy radiation that the DNA strands are chopped up into tiny bits, effectively killing the cells. Think of it as taking a chef’s knife to the DNA and mincing it up into tiny, useless pieces. Unfortunately, not all cancers are susceptible to radiation treatment, as some cancers (including the one I had in my youth) have a greatly enhanced ability to fix damage to their DNA. This means the radiation tactic doesn’t work, and will only kill healthy cells. In these causes, chemotherapy is used instead (which kills both cancer and healthy cells).
Imagine radiation is like a gun. It’s shooting bullets into your DNA. A few shots will leave your cells alive, but they’re not going to be working right. Maybe they still die, but maybe those bullets hit the right few spots to make it do something it wasn’t originally intended to do. But if you shoot it a lot more times, then it’s going to be dead on the floor.
Great question!
In general, cancer is caused by mutations in your DNA that create a cell that only cares about growing and dividing, even when other cells and signals tell it not to.
Mutations can come from a ton of sources, and actually happen all the time. Most of the time, when your cells realize they have mutated DNA, they die, either because the damage is so great that they literally can’t function, or because they detected the damage and decided to commit suicide in a controlled process called “apoptosis” specifically to *prevent* renegade cells like cancer from forming.
So radiation damage causes cancer by creating the *perfect*, one-in-million mutation that doesn’t make the cells die, but instead grow uncontrollably. When you have a tumor, we blast it with radiation and cause even *more* damage, this time at a catastrophic level. Even cancer cells then become completely unable to function because their instruction set (DNA) is totally ruined.
This is actually the general strategy behind a lot of cancer treatments like radiation and chemotherapy. We basically poison the cancer cells in the same way that would kill your normal cells, and just try to control it so the tumor dies before too much of the rest of you. It’s a very blunt instrument, and we are trying very hard to find better ones.
Radiation damages cells. It’s like a bunch of little molecule-scale bullets that shoot holes through your cells and the molecules inside. When this cellular damage includes DNA (the instructions your cells use to operate and build stuff), your cells start to malfunction. With their instruction manual in tatters, they can start growing and producing out of control. That’s cancer.
The radiation treatment for cancer is just an even higher dose of the same damaging bullets. It’s not “curing” cancer cells, it’s just completely shredding and killing them. The beam of radiation is carefully targeted to try and destroy all the cancer cells while doing minimal damage to the surrounding tissue.
Thank you everyone for your responses, I appreciate your knowledge!
How cancer happens:
every single moment cells in you body trues to duplicate. Some if them are duplicated without controll. Such cell are killed by immune system. This is totally normal process.
Radiation provides random small mutation. Most of mutation celles are killed on site. However at some point there will appear uncontrolled cells which looks like normal for immune system. At this point lumps are starting to form and cancer established.
Yet such cells are not normal and are frigile. With strong radiation dose they become damaged and then recycled by immune system.
People who expirienced cancer once have to take special medication for rest of their live, because cancer returns
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