For example, if someone discovers they have breast cancer or cancer in the liver or something, does that mean that they always had cancer but it was not able to be detected until they discovered they had it? Or is that something that is formed later, and wasn’t always in that person’s body?
In: Biology
It is the latter!
Cancer cells arise from normal cells that transform (it’s actually called malignant transformation) to become cancerous. So I wouldn’t compare it to something like a congenital heart defect, where a patient may be diagnosed later in life but they have had the condition since birth.
However, cancer can also be difficult to detect when it’s in early stages. Usually a tumor has had time to grow a bit before being detected. Different cancers grow at different rates, so a person may have had cancer for weeks, months, or years before being diagnosed.
Edit: even if a person is born with a cancer associated mutation, they are rarely guaranteed to get sick. Most (if not all – can’t think of any exceptions off the top of my head) of these mutations will only lead to disease in a subset of people with the mutation. And even if a patient goes on to develop cancer, the tumor would have evolved from cells that were at one point totally normal. So while this patient was a carrier of the mutation their entire life, they wouldn’t have had the actual cancer their entire life.
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