My understanding of cancer is that an organ’s cells tgo rogue. It starts to multiply uncontrollably and this affects certain functions of that organ. Moreover, this behaviour spreads to other organs resulting in uncontrollable cell multiplication of that organ and so on.
What I don’t understand is how does the uncontrolled cell multiplication of one organ “spread” to another wherein that impacted organ also begins to show this behaviour? How can say breast cells impact lungs by spreading to them considering they are both different organs, functions, cells.
In: Biology
One of the key features of cancer cells is that they usually stop performing their primary functions in favor of just growing and dividing more. So when you get liver cancer, those liver cancer cells aren’t behaving like liver cells should, they are mostly just behaving like cancer cells. They take nutrients from the healthy liver cells and slowly “take over” until you hardly have any liver cells actually doing their jobs.
Then one of these cells (or a cluster of cells) breaks off, finds its way into your bloodstream, and hitches a ride to a new location, say your lungs. Now those cancer cells start to mess up the environment in your lungs, steal nutrients that your lung cells were using, spit out a bunch of molecules that encourage other cells to become cancer-like, and generally cause havoc. You’re absolutely right, these are not lung cells, and that’s the main problem. They will continue to grow and divide until you have so many cancer cells in your lung tissue that the lung cells get crowded out and can’t do their jobs anymore. It’s these types of effects that ultimately causes death in most terminal cancer patients.
In addition to metastasis (the technical term for cancer spreading), a key search term you can use to learn more is “dedifferentiation” or “ poorly differentiated” cells. “Differentiation” is the process by which your stem cells turn into specialized cells and learn to perform their specific functions (like lung cells exchanging oxygen gas, or liver cells breaking down alcohol in your blood). Cancer unwinds this process and starts to look more like stem cells, hence the term “de-differentiation” and referring to advanced cancer cells as “poorly differentiated”.
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