Like if you detect it early enough, I know you can remove it. But what is the point that it can’t just be removed, and why?
In: Biology
Typically, it is no longer amenable to surgical cure once the tumour cells get too close to important anatomy, or grow into important anatomy. For example, an abdominal tumour that is wrapped around the nerves, vessels and tissue of the liver, pancreas and kidneys cannot be surgical removed – you’d kill the patient in the process. You need what’s called “gross total resection” for a surgical cure, which is a fancy way of saying the surgeon cut out all the tumour they could see, and, a further cut of health tissue 1-2cm around the visible tumour, and, a pathologist who reviews the tissue confirms the margins contained no tumour tissue.
However.
Not all tumours are equal.
There are tumours like diffuse astrocytomas, which have sub-microscope tendrils, perhaps only a few cells wide, that extend out into the healthy tissue. Even if the surgeon and pathologist think they’ve got all the tumour, there is almost always missed cells that will regrow.
There are tumours that “seed”, little clumps of cells have already left the main tumour body, so a full resection of the tumour won’t be curative.
There are tumours that are adjacent to critical structures, like perhaps the brain stem. You can remove the tumour tissue that’s outside the stem, but you cannot remove the tissue in the brain stem, so you cannot achieve gross total resection.
Then there are the blood cancers, which cannot be surgically removed at all.
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