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
the cells in your body follow rules so they play nice together. sometimes cells have a mutation that makes them stop following rules and be selfish. this happens to an existing cell by dna damage or a new cell during division, it’s not something you were born with. usually your immune system notices and kills it and you are fine, but sometimes the mutation also helps it hide from the immune system. this is when cancer gets dangerous and grows into a tumor.
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
There are factors that make some people more predisposed to cancer than others, like environmental factors and lifestyle. In some cases of breast cancer, there are genetic predispositions, like the mutated BRCA gene.
Generally speaking, some forms of cancers can be genetic, but that doesn’t mean it’s always been in their body, it just means they may have a higher chance of developing it at certain point vs someone else who may not have the same risk factors involved.
Cancer is essentially a random mutation. Your cells go through a constant cycle of replication. At any one moment due to essentially random chance, the result of this replication is a cancerous cell instead of a regular cell. These then continue to replicate and live parasitically off of you, hindering the proper function of whatever part or organ they’re growing onto until they ultimately kill you. It’s even possible that you unknowingly have had cancerous cells form inside you that your immune system managed to kill quickly enough before they spread. Cancer factors are simply things that make the appearance of such cells more likely but basically anyone is liable to getting cancer at any point for no particular reason other than random chance. Once cancer forms it’s very difficult to completely get rid of.
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.
I have BRCA1, passed down from my grandma. I had to have my ovaries removed when I was 15.
When ever my wife gets drunk she’ll scream and cry that I need my boobies removed, because that will be where the cancer will come back (we had our tenth anniversary in May. I’m sitting next to her in bed, and you can’t knock the smile off my face. I can’t believe someone as wonderful as her would love someone like me).
Ancestral cancer is a bit rare, as it tends to kill you before you can reproduce. It’s mostly smoking, drinking and working with asbestos and lead
Latest Answers