How do carcinogenic substances cause cancer? What happens in your body?
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so some carcinogens we see more than others (like cigarettes for example, are more accessible and we can see them/buy them everywhere…) whether you apply it on the skin, breath it in, or get radiation therapy it will go super deep into your cells! with more and more of it you ‘consume’ or are around the higher chance you *could* get cancer.
when it gets super deep into your cells like that and can’t get filtered out it kinda starts just relaxing in your body and is now your new best friend 🙂 it also promotes the idea that your cells should just do whatever tf they want and overpopulate.
The most common way that carcinogenic substances cause cancer is by damaging your DNA. DNA can repair breaks and missing bases, and it needs to because of normal wear and tear, but it makes mistakes. When a substance that’s particularly good at getting into the nucleus of cells (where it shouldn’t be) and breaking the DNA is causing large amounts of damage, it’s much more likely that a mistake is going to be made. If that mistake involves DNA for cell replication, the cell will start growing and dividing uncontrollably – cancer. If the mistake involves cell death, then if that cell starts becoming cancerous naturally, then your body’s first line of defence – getting that cell to self-destruct – won’t work, so cancer is again a lot more likely
Cancer is basically cells of your body grow and multiply uncontrollably. Current treatments like chemo and radiation kill these cells but they also kill other cells and that’s the problem…it not exactly precise. These cancer causing things trigger the rampant cell growth.
Cells reproduce, and when they do, they copy their DNA to the new cell. Sometimes it’s not a perfect copy, and you get a mutant cell. Most of those mutants die on their own or get killed by the immune system. Your body’s probably killing mutant cells right now.
But sometimes a mutant survives, doesn’t trigger the immune response, and even reproduces. That’s cancer. Given enough cells reproducing over enough time, it’s pretty much a certainty that it’ll eventually happen if you don’t die of something else first. That’s just nature and statistics.
Carcinogens don’t actually cause cancer, what they do is increase the odds of it happening whenever your cells reproduce. They affect the DNA or the copying process, increasing the statistical chance of cell reproduction turning out wrong and resulting in a surviving, reproducing mutant.
More exposure to carcinogens increases the number of cells affected and the chances of cancer developing. If something increases the odds enough that many people exposed to it get cancer before dying of something else, then we call it a carcinogen. And some people say it ’causes’ cancer. But really the cause of cancer is just the innate imperfect nature of cellular reproduction. Carcinogens are just a catalyst that increase the odds of imperfection.
Recently, we’ve discovered something really interesting. [Peto’s Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox) – larger animals have more cells, and therefore more cellular reproduction happening, so they should have a higher chance of getting cancer.
But they don’t. In fact, it seems to be exceptionally rare in elephants and whales. And there’s a lot of research going on into why that is. Currently it seems like they’re just better at killing mutant cells before they reproduce and form tumors. But there could be more to it than that. One theory is that the tumors themselves get tumors which kill them off. There are other theories too. It’s an interesting ongoing area of research where we don’t really know the answers yet.
see also: [Why Blue Whales Dont Get Cancer – Peto’s Paradox](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV1SlzDnS-A) for a good explanation.
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