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
Hi, Anatomical Pathology doctor here.
“Cancer” is an umbrella term for any disease where cells lose control of their ability to regulate how they grow, resulting in exaggerated growth and, eventually for a lot of cancers, spread to other tissues in the body where they do not belong.
Imagine an invasive species that is introduced to an ecosystem where it absolutely thrives and outcompetes all other organisms in that ecosystem and ends up destroying them. This is what cancer can be compared to when it has spread.
Now, let’s think about cancer that begins in the breast. Think of an animal that has lots of different varieties – perhaps a dog for example. There are many breeds of dog, some of which are intrinsically aggressive and energetic (let’s say a particularly uppity chihuahua), and others which are slow and plodding (let’s say a Newfoundland). “Breast cancer” can be thought of in a similar way. There any many “breeds” of breast cancer – all of which have their intrinsic biological behaviour, some of which are very aggressive and destructive like our friend the psycho chihuahua, and others that are very slow to spread like our big dumb Newfoundland.
This is the same analogy for cancers that begin in tissues all across the body. There are a biblical amount of different varieties that act differently, but all share the ability to invade and destroy surrounding or distant tissue, which (VERY simplified) ultimately leads to death.
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