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
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.
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