If you’re diagnosed with breast cancer is the rest of you safe? Or is it more like you have cancer in your body and it started in the breast?
In: Biology
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Generally, if it’s just called breast cancer, it’s just in the breast. But any cancer can spread if it’s not treated, which is why early screening is important. Brest cancer by itself has a good recovery rate, once it spreads to a different organ then treatment is more difficult. Sometimes if it started in the breast and then spread, it can be called “secondary breast cancer”
Breast cancer is cells from the breast which have become cancerous. That means that they are growing uncontrollably, forming tumors, and spreading to neighboring tissue. If untreated, breast cancer will spread throughout your body. In that case, you may have tumors in any of your organs, but closer examination would make it clear that those cells originated from your breast. The spread to other organs is called metastasis. If that has occurred, then you’re diagnosed with “metastatic breast cancer.”
We care about where cancers originated because different types of cells will react differently to different treatments. For example, most breast cells need estrogen to grow, so many treatments for breast cancer utilize medications which modulate estrogen to starve the cells. Similarly, prostrate cancer can be treated by blocking the production of testosterone. All of this depends on the circumstances and modern research is getting increasingly granular, with drugs being made for increasingly specific circumstances. That’s way some of the pharmaceutical commercials you see on TV are so specific (“do you have ER positive her2 negative breast cancer? Then this drug may be for you”)
Hope that all made sense and I hope you’re asking out of curiosity and not due to any recent health changes.
Cancer by definition is a growth that starts in one area of the body and can spread to others. Breast cancer starts in the breast but can spread to the brain, bones, or other parts of the body of left untreated.
Cancer doctors use stage to describe how far a cancer has spread. An in situ, or stage 0, cancer is still in the place the initial place and hasn’t spread at all. A local cancer, or stage 1, has spread a bit but is still in the body part it is growing from and no where else. A regional cancer, stage 2/3, has spread to the lymph nodes, which are basically a highway that your immune system uses to fight disease. Unfortunately when cancer spreads to the lymph nodes, it uses this same highway to move to other parts of the body. A distant cancer, or stage 4, has spread to other far away body parts and is much harder to treat.
The reason we do screening when we can is to find any cancers that are still stage 0/1 and remove them surgically before they start to spread in the later stages. Our known treatments have a much higher chance of success to remove small, contained cancers.
All cancers are called (named) for the tissue type they originate in. Therefore, a breast cell that becomes cancerous is called breast cancer. This is important because NOT all cancers act the same, and treatment is offered accordingly. Also: most cancers (left untreated) continue to grow and spread… Common places (for example) would be the lungs, or bone. When a breast cancer spreads to the lungs, it is now called metastatic breast cancer, NOT lung cancer. A lung cancer has very different biologic behavior, which guides treatment.
In general, I would say that if any part of you has cancer, no part of you is safe, but some parts may be more easily affected based on the type of cancer. For instance, some can spread by proximity, or because the cancer cells got into the lymphatic system, the blood, or other method that may enable it to spread to an organ of a different tissue type.
With breast tissue, it is important to remember breast tissue cells can happen naturally anywhere along the human milk line, which goes from armpit to groin on each side. Normally this tissue is not active, many will never notice it, beyond maybe a supernumerary nipple, although some in pregnancy or during breastfeeding sometimes have lumps along the line. So, yes, you can have breast cancer in your armpit or lower ribcage.
I am not a medical professional, just a former patient remembering how it was explained to me.
My mom was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer that spread everywhere. By the time they caught it she had tumours all over and her bones were deteriorating. It was in my lymph nodes, skull, breasts and cervix. She was seeing 3 different doctors for what she thought was separate issues.
Is a leg injury just injuries found in the leg?
Any cancer can spread, that’s what makes it so dangerous. Hopefully it is caught early enough that it can be stopped or removed before it spreads. Breast cancer is more likely to be noticed due to where on the body it is.
Breast cancer means the origin of the cancer was breast tissue
It could spread through the body but they would still be breast cells, just cancerous ones
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