“*A carcinogen is a substance, organism or agent capable of causing cancer*”.
“*Cancer* is *a disease in which some of the body’s cells grow uncontrollably and spread to other parts of the body*”.
How does something like alcohol or tobacco cause cancer?
In: Biology
Cancer cells develop because of damage to DNA; specifically the DNA in certain genes that control cell division. So anything that can damage DNA can cause cancer. That goes for radiation, various chemicals, certain types of viruses, it depends on the instigator.
Simply put, anything that can damage a cell can cause cancer. That covers everything from certain chemicals to spiky rock fibers (asbestos) and radiation.
Your cells constantly divide and die off, and both functionalities are in the cell’s DNA. Cancer happens when
1) The part of the DNA responsible for controlling the division breaks,
2) The part of the DNA responsible for making the cell kill itself breaks, and
3) The cell gets the signal to start dividing.
End result is a clump of cells that keeps on growing uncontrollably, i.e. cancer.
If you’re smoking, for example, you’re inhaling smoke which has a lot of harmful substances in it which get in your lungs and damage the tissue there. Your body is good at repairing itself and killing off any cells that look suspicious, but the more damage you cause with the smoke, the more likely is that you lose those three (simplified) dice rolls and end up with a tumor in your lungs.
Your cells contain instructions for how to be a cell in your body. Things like tobacco cause those instructions to get scrambled, duplicated, or deleted. So you go from an instruction that says something like, “while you’re an embryo, grow a whole bunch, then chill” to “….grow a whole bunch…” And cells start multiplying when they’re not supposed to, invading into other parts of your body, and this is cancer.
So every single time our cells divide their a tiny chance that they can turn into cancer cells. Thing’s that cause cancer are known to cause damage our DNA and that makes it more likely cells turn cancerous when they divide.
But also, when we say something “causes” cancer we means that something is linked to a noticeably increased risk in developing cancer. I know people have have smoked cigarettes their entire life and never developed cancer (lots of other health problems), but not cancer.Smoking is still basically the worst thing you could possible do to yourself that is, or was, widely practiced. Please don’t smoke.
Cancer itself is uncontrollable cell growth, but the trigger for that is usually genetic mutation. Alcohol and tobacco can influence genetic mutations by damaging DNA and thereby increase the chance that you’ll get a mutation that leads to cancer.
Every time a cell divides it could go wrong, and anything that makes cells divide can increase cancer risk. There’s two factors there, how often cells are dividing and how likely each division is to go wrong.
Think of it like rolling dice. You roll every time a cell divides to see if it went wrong. The “goes wrong” side is more likely the more damage your DNA has received.
Some things like asbestos damage your cells and make them produce new cells. Things like radiation make each division more risky by damaging your DNA.
Through some sort of DNA damage they cause mutations. Sometimes those mutations do nothing, sometimes they just cause the cell with the mutationto die, and in unfortunate circumstances, they can also cause the cell to divide uncontrollably. That uncontrolled division is what we call cancer, and the cancer type (eg.breast, lung,etc.), depends on the cell type affected.
The nature of these mutations vary. And though you may have two “lung” cancers, if they are caused by different mutations then treatment that works on one may not work on the other. That’s why it’s hard to say that there is a “cure for cancer”. Cancer is a whole constellation of diseases, each caused or enhanced by different mutations in different genes, so there is unlikely to be a “cure-all” for cancer. Luckily, we are getting better at identifying the mutations and learning how to treat them specifically. So, while “cancer” might not be cured, we’re working our hardest on treating as many subtypes as we can.
cancer cells are (very) basically just corrupted cells. Tobacco and cigarettes of numerous chemicals that harm cells, causing deformities in them that corrupts them and turns them into cancer cells.
Most cancers are caused by DNA that goes wrong, like a hard drive error. Most are obviously just errors that stop things from working, but if you’re unlucky, you can have an error that makes everything work way too well. The vulnerable genes are ones that act like off switches for cell replication, which are only on when the cells are first produced. If you knock them out so the switch is always on, you suddenly have a cell that won’t stop replicating. That might not be enough, but if you knock out other off switches for things like telling the body to feed it more, and you’re pretty much looking at cancer.
DNA damage can be caused a few ways. Radiation and chemicals can actually damage it or convert one base into another. Some chemicals don’t damage DNA, but stick to it to alter its shape so that the repair mechanisms repair it incorrectly.
DNA duplicates duplicates duplicates. To make every cell in our body. We often get errors in our DNA but our body can quickly fix it. When we get errors that are in our DNA that our body doesn’t fix and then it replicates the errors this is called cancer. Being exposed to carcinogens is one way our body makes those DNA errors (mutations). The more errors the less likely it will be caught and MULTIPLY (=cancer).
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