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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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.
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