How does cancer spread to other parts of the body?

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My fiancé was diagnosed with stage 4 Lymphoma last month and has cancer in different parts of his body. From my understanding, Lymphoma is a blood cancer, but it’s also in his liver, which is an organ. The doctors did tests to see if he had any in his bones, but he did not. I’ve tried asking the doctors and they tried to tell me it’s in the lymph nodes, and lymph nodes are all over the body. I don’t really know what lymph nodes are and they seemed really busy so I didn’t want to continually hold them up.

The way I thought our bodies worked was that each cell basically had one job. When we get cancer, one cell is defective and divides more than it is supposed to and creates a mass. From my understanding, all the cells in the mass are related to the one defective cell and shouldn’t influence cells with different jobs. They are just taking up extra space. How then does cancer get into organs and bones? Are those cancer cells still descendants of the original defective cell and just taking up residence in other parts of the body? Or are they communicating somehow with other cells and convincing them to behave in a similarly destructive way, making the cancer in the organs/bones different from the original?

In: Biology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Way oversimplified:

One of the body’s defenses against cancer is if a cell ends up in the “wrong” place, it gets sent a signal that tells it to, literally, kill itself. It’s easier to do that than figure out how to get the cell back to where it belongs, and it’s probably not a good cell if it wandered anyway.

Advanced cancers or “aggressive” cancers are producing cells that have mutated away that characteristic. So when they get that kill signal, they say “no u” and keep on trucking. That’s also why doctors can tend to tell what the original cancer was: the cells ARE descendants of that. So if you find a bunch of liver-like cells growing in a mass on the lungs, it’s generally a sign that the initial cancer was liver cancer.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Cells often break off of the cancer mass and travel through the bloodstream to other organs. Certain organs are more likely than others to host malignancies.

In the case of lymphomas, the affected cells may already be free-floating within the lymphatic system. The lymphatic system you could think of as a different kind of blood that flows along its own network of vessels throughout the body. (That’s a big oversimplification, but essentially correct.)

Metastatic cancer—that is, cancer that has traveled and settled in a different organ or body area—is still the same kind of cancer. Biopsies can reveal the original source of the cancer. However, it’s also possible, though very rare, for someone to have more than one cancer at the same time. You’re right that metastatic cancer is still the “child” of the original tumor type.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Lymph nodes are essentially gathering places for various cells of the immune system where they can exchange certain information and multiply when needed. Lymphocytes are a particular subset of immune cells, and lymphoma is cancer derived from such cells. You’re right that a cancer is all descended from one original cell going bad, and they don’t turn other cells into more cancer (though they can and do communicate with other cells near them — including telling immune cells to leave them alone).

Cancers often end up in other places when they grow invasively and end up growing through the side of a blood/lymph vessel, at which point clumps of cancerous cells break off and carried along with the flow. In the case of lymphomas though, the original cells were in the blood to begin with, but they can still end up lodged in particular places. Where exactly is influenced by the cancer (what it’s derived from), for instance, B cell lymphomas can end up in the bone marrow because B cells are equipped to go there to begin with.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s relatively new research that observed cancer cells traveling through the liquid filled channels between cells and organs, known as the interstitium.

[https://oxsci.org/cancer-could-interstitium-be-the-answer/](https://oxsci.org/cancer-could-interstitium-be-the-answer/)

[https://radiolab.org/podcast/interstitium](https://radiolab.org/podcast/interstitium)