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
To a five-year-old: Cancer is cells behaving badly. When they do they change at a fast rate. They will often make more and more of themselves. This happens in some types of cells more often than others. So breast cancer is when your breast cells start behaving badly. Sometimes they behave so badly that they travel to other parts of the body.
Yes, you can get breast cancer in other parts of the body if those cells are behaving really, really badly. But no, having breast cancer does not mean that non-breast cells will start behaving badly. Although sometimes we have things happen that make lots of different kinds of cells behave badly or weirdly. These are things that “cause cancer,” which is a fancy way of saying that they make cells more likely to behave badly.
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