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
Cells aren’t always just immobile per say. Even when they are a part of a tissue, during replication they can as a group branch out and invade nearby tissues. They can also break off and invade on their own, especially since these are some of the characteristics cancer mutations can encourage.
Now, pretty much every tissue of your body needs to have access to your vasculature system–to the circulating fluids through your veins and arteries and capillaries and the like. These cells can potentially break off the tumor mass and flow elsewhere to your body, where they embed themselves in the new location, multiply, and produce new tumors. This process of spreading is metastasis, and is one of the big lines that make cancer progression suddenly much more serious, terminal, and unrecoverable at times–one tumor mass is a lot more manageable than the case where you have one original mass and an untold number of secondary tumors spread throughout your body (some potentially not even detectable). Treatment after that point becomes more complicated and potentially even futile.
To my knowledge, one of the reasons why lung cancer is so bad is because of how well situated it is to jump into spreading through your blood stream.
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