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
Basically, cells potentially become cancerous but are weeded out by a plethora of host defenses. Kind of like missile defenses like iron dome. Cancer is a failure of all of these. From suicide genes to self cellular repair, it is mostly your immune system keeping cancer in check.Some cancers start decades earlier, growing silently or lie dormant making them difficult to find as they are asymptomatic. Take pancreatic cancer, we think it can start 20 years prior to the first symptoms. It is very curable in some forms when caught early, but almost never is. Symptoms like jaundice are late findings that portend a worse diagnosis. This is why it is so scary. It might be living in you now. Pay attention to pain, weight changes and listen to your body. And don’t smoke
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