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
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.
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