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
There are many kinds of breast cancer. They do not all behave the same, and they also respond differently to female hormones. For example a good friend of mine died from her form, as she was pregnant and decided to basically give up her life to let the child live. Another woman I know was diagnosed at age 80, and was told she basically would not die of breast cancer, but of old-age issues, so they advised no treatment, and that really was the best thing for her. She lived another 11 years and passed away in her sleep.
Breast cancer is not just found in the breast.
As other people have stated, cancer is named for where it starts. If you have breast cancer, you will be lucky if you catch it while it is still only in the breast, because it’s a much more serious disease after it spreads. For instance, if the breast cancer cells migrate to the bone, they will eat away at the bone. This is painful and can make the bones break. If they migrate to the brain, they’ll cause brain issues there. And so on.
So yes, you can think of it as cancer which only started in the breast.
However, that said, “breast cancer” is a kind of peculiar term in that it includes many conditions which are not particularly serious. “Ductal carcinoma in situ” (DCIS) is technically a cancer (“ductal carcinoma” means that it is cancer of the milk ducts, which is where breast cancer typically starts), but the fact that it is “in situ” means that it is not invasive, and it may in fact stay in the breast. If you have DCIS, most likely the rest of you is safe. However, since most women who have DCIS opt for it to be removed, research on this is ongoing.
This is a good question, but hard to answer at a 5yo level.
Cancer in the breast can spread to other places, if not treated, or if available treatments are not good enough. Cancerous breast cells prefer to go to particular places in the body, when they spread. But they are still breast cells, and we can identify them as such no matter where we find them, if we do a biopsy and look at/test them.
Having had cancer in one particular type of cell, may mean that you are fundamentally more likely to develop cancer in other cell types. You may have a pre-existing level or type of DNA damage that takes fewer mistakes to lose control of cell division. Or your body’s system of finding and destroying out-of-control cells may be faulty. Or you may just be that unlucky person whose number came up. And like the Hunger Games, the older you are, and the harder your life, the more lottery entries with your name on them.
This loss of cell division control is the basic problem in cancer. But it can happen in hundreds or maybe thousands of ways, and the type of error and type of cell determine how best to treat it. But even the best treatments can’t get every cell, and rely on your body having intact systems of cell monitoring and destruction to do a lot of the work.
So, in summary, your answer is 1. It depends, and 2. Yes and no.
Generally, no. There are many different types of cancers that have different causes, different effects on the body, rates of progression, etc.
It’s called breast cancer if it starts in the breast, but there are different types of breast cancer. So two people with breast cancer may have different cancer types, and a person with say, skin cancer, almost certainly has a different type of cancer than the person with breast cancer.
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.
The definition of cancers is that they are not safe and have the potential to spread. If it doesn’t have the potential to spread, it’s not cancer but a benign tumor (benign tumors can still cause health complications, though, and can become cancerous.)
Breast cancer actually has one of the worse prognoses of tissue cancers because it spreads readily and can cause secondary tumors in vital organs.
This is why even relatively early intervention is often quite radical (double mastectomy is not uncommon) because aggressive treatment gives the best chance of survival.
It depends on the diagnosis. Your cancer will be classified by stage and grade, usually numbers 1-4. Stages 1 and 2 mean the cancer is in the breast. Stage 3 means it is in the breast but has also spread to nearby lymph nodes. Stage 4 means it is more aggressive and is in the breast and in other sites in your body, aka metastatic disease. The grade of the tumor refers to what the cells look like that make up the tumor. Grade 1 means the cells are closer to normal breast cells. Grade 4 means the cells are really abnormal (larger, multiple nuclei, etc.).
If you have breast cancer and it is only in your breast it is kind of like a bag of flour. So treatment will focus on getting that bag of flour out (surgery, chemo, radiation). If the breast cancer has spread it beyond the breast it is still breast cancer – but now elsewhere in your body too. It is like the bag of flour burst. Instead of one location to focus on it is much more difficult to find all the individual pieces of flour (cancerous cells) and the treatment becomes more complex and harder.
Medical research is amazing. When Terry Fox started his run to raise money for cancer research the survival rate for childhood leukaemia was around one in ten. It is now around nine in ten.
Make sure you insist on a full body scan from oncologist. MRI. If they push back, question their credibility. My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer 2 years ago. Got chemo, radiation, and a mastectomy. Was told she was clear of cancer, and then passed away a month after that news from a tumor that had grown in her brain.
DO NOT BE AFRAID TO INSIST ON GETTING THE MRI!
Started in the breast. Basically any cell from any organ can turn into a cancer cell. It then gains more mutations until it ‘leaves the nest’ so to speak and spreads elsewhere. It just takes the right accumulations of mutations. Rest of body safe if detected early most of the time. Rest of body not safe if found too late or not dealt with soon enough.
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