So today I found out that Kelly Preston die of breast cancer, also today I found out that I have no idea how cancer works.
What I knew:
>>cancer = tumor (cells divided uncontrollably and no longer perform their roles)
>>sometime tumors can not be removed (which I understand when it comes to organs like the brain, you can’t get to it without breaking some other part BUT I don’t get it why you can easily cut out breast tumors or skin ones???)
>>sometimes cells from those tumors will travel through blood and that leads to tumors in other places, why is that possible??
And those are my main question, why can’t you just go in and cut the tumor out in those non-essential organs?
In: Biology
[deleted]
Cancers spread via the circulatory system. So if you don’t catch them early they can spread from a relatively non-vital area to several more vital areas.
Some cancers are very aggressive and even if you cut them out, all it takes is a few cells left behind for them to start up again.
One thing I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned is that for the most part cancer cells are very “energy hungry”. It takes a lot of calories to fuel the rapid division of cancer cells and growth of tumors. Simply put they deprive surrounding cells of any nutrients and calories.
This is why people with cancers often appear frail and one of the warning signs is rapid, unintentional weight loss. This means that even cancers of non-essential organs can deprive the rest of the body of nutrients.
I’m a nurse and used to work in oncology for a number of years and have seen patients die from cancers of non essential organs like tonsils and appendix and it always felt so wrong that they should die from a cancer of an organ that a lot of people have removed as children.
As you pointed out, tumors originated from a cell growing and dividing uncontrollably, due to several specific mutations. As it originates from a single cell, when trying to remove a tumor, you are facing a crucial dilemma : How do I make sure I removed ALL of the cancerous cells without taking too much healthy tissue out, specially on vital organs ?
Then, when the tumor grows, the risk of seeing cancerous cells detaching and ending up in the bloodstream increases. Whenever that happens, you may end up with a new tumor developping elsewhere in the body, potentially affecting or crushing a vital organ.
>BUT I don’t get it why you can easily cut out breast tumors or skin ones???
Often you can.
By the time you do so, metastasis may have already started.
>sometimes cells from those tumors will travel through blood and that leads to tumors in other places, why is that possible??
Because every cell in the human body has the DNA for the entire body, and parts of the human body travel around within it.
The most obvious example of a cell that you *want* to travel around your blood stream, lymph nodes, and even through other tissues sometimes, is white blood cells. The ones that help you recover when you’re sick, stop you from dying when a splinter pierces your skin, etc. Their ability to do so is encoded in the DNA of *every* cell and all a cancer cell has to do is then toggle that DNA back on.
It started as breast cacner, then spreads to other places. Most likely her lynoathic system.
Cancer is what happens if certain cellular control mechanisms fail, most often because of a spontaneous mutation in a gene responsible for regulating cell growth. Cells in animals actually have a kind of suicide switch which prompts the cell to kill itself under certain conditions that indicate the cell’s DNA could be irreparibly damaged, this process is called “apoptosis”.If this doesn’t happen, the cell may start dividing indiscriminately, whereas in healthy cells, there are a multitude of factors controlling cell division, for example cells stop growing if the cell senses that a certain density of sister cells in it’s spatial proximity has been reached, and they will not divide into new cells until the cell itself has reached a certain size.Because cancer cells divide no matter what, not only do they not care about being surrounded by other cells, they also divide so fast, they don’t have time to grow to the size of a healthy cell, so the dividing cells get smaller, which is why they can actually peel away from their respective tissue, get carried off in the bloodstream and anchor themselves between the cells of some other tissue, they are squeezing through the gaps because they are so small.
Cancer cells’ proclivity to grow faster than healthy tissue is actually used in chemotherapy – the drugs you get during chemotherapy are often chemicals that look very similar to the DNA building blocks, which is why they get build into the DNA if it gets replicated – a necessary step for cell division. The chemicals don’t actually work like DNA, though, so the copied DNA just becomes dysfunctional and the cell dies. This kills all cells which take in the drugs, but since cancer cells divide so much faster, they die quicker than healthy cells. It’s a bit like injecting a kind of poison to which your healthy cells have some resistance, but the cancer cells don’t. This is also why hair falls out in someone undergoing chemotherapy, hair follice cells divide relatively fast and are thus more easily damaged than many other types of cells in the body.
edit: I actually forgot to explain the most important question, how does cancer in a non-essential organ kill you? Not only do the cancer cells, like little parasites, eat the food that’s meant for your healthy cells without benefiting the body in any way, if they grow into essential organs they can disrupt their function. Imagine your heart trying to pump blood with breast tissue growing inside it, imagine your lungs trying to expand, but there are little lumps of tissue fusing parts of the lungs that shouldn’t be mechanically connected…
Another way certain kinds of cancer cells can screw with your body is producing chemical signals that influence with it’s biochemical balance. The healthy cells are going to try and compensate, but at some point, it’s just no longer possible and you die because your body can’t regulate it’s functions adequately anymore.
could you cut an organ out, wash its cells away (and thus the cancer), repopulate the matrix w your stem cells, then re-implant the organ cancer free? you could just rinse and repeat w every organ you have that has cancer crop up..
So… Is it possible to die from a tumor that does not metastasize/compress vital organ? How?
Once a cancer starts to metastasize you have to think of it more like a mold growing on bread. It’s not a ball of cancer it lives in and around everything else. Even if you were to remove the moldy slice of bread there is still mold in the rest of the loaf that will eventually grow big enough to see.
Latest Answers