Why do people die from cancer even though they are receiving treatment?
In: Biology
Simplest I can explain is that even though there is treatments there is NO cure. It all depends on how bad the cancer is and how that person reacts to the treatment.
Treatment usually consists of (1) removing cancerous mass and/or (2) reducing the spread of cancerous cells through chemotherapy or radiation. Still, cancer = mutated cells that continue replicating; there is no way to really control/predict their behavior.
The treatments we have just aren’t that good. Cancer is a difficult disease to treat because cancer cells are human cells, it is very difficult to develop drugs which only kill cancer cells without damaging healthy tissue so a lot of cancer treatment boils down to trying to kill the cancer before you kill the patient. And even if you kill 99% of the cancer, it can grow back, and there’s no real way to know if all of the cancer is gone.
All cancers are different, some are easily treated if they are caught early enough and some cancers are so slow growing that you’re likely to die of something else before the cancer kills you. But others are so aggressive and hard to treat that there is almost no chance of survival.
The treatment can also kill you. Accute Leukemia can require a bone marrow transplant. The transplant it self has a very high mortality rate
The treatments also massively injure the healthy parts of your body and limit the body’s ability to fight off common diseases like a cold/rsv and diseases that are apparently floating around that people not on massive doses of chemo wouldn’t even blink at. So, you are more likely to get very ill and even die from non-cancerous crap while you are in treatment, too, but that is still a cancer or cancer-adjacent fatality.
Source: daughter fighting leukemia who ended up in icu on multiple occasions for reasons including RSV, fungal pneumonia, and an ear infection.
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