I’m educated enough to generally understand that cancer is the result of a gene mutation, which activates rapid cell reproduction, but what about this growing/spreading tumor makes it fatal? Why can’t we just periodically remove the tumor as it continues grow, thereby (almost) completely eliminating any possible death threat from cancer?
***EDIT: thanks for all the responses to my question! Some of them are really great, and perfectly answer my question. Frankly, I was not aware that cancerous cells and tumors have, in so many ways, “a mind of their own”.***
***I’m very lucky to have been of general good health my whole life, but the threat of cancer as I age scares the daylights outta me — it literally keeps me up at night, often. I’m slightly relieved to realize that so much is known about cancer and so many different treatment options exist, depending on the diagnosis and prognosis. And I recognize this wealth of knowledge, understanding, and treatment options is growing almost by the day with modern medicine — and this helps put me at ease a little too.***
***Here’s to ongoing good health for me and you…!***
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A few reasons
1) tumors don’t like to function normally, some become hyper functional and do way to much of what they normally do (neuroendocrine tumors often produce way to much of the hormone they normally produce to the point where it messes up everything else. An example is a gastrinoma which produces way to much of a hormone that is responsible for telling your stomach to make acid. This excess acid production can lead to peptic ulcers which can be life threatening if they perforate). This hyper function can mess with the bodies normal function and cause harm.
2) tumors can also just do nothing productive other then grow, and they focus on this so much that they recruit extra blood vessels to feed them resources to continue growing, siphoning resources away from healthy tissue in the same organ, causing them to fail eventually, compromising other organs in the body.
3) tumors spread, melanoma can travel to the brain, bowel cancer can spread to the liver etc. when they spread, they continue acting like the original tumor, and like point 2) they start growing and stealing resources from this new organ, so a melanoma from the skin spreading to the brain is bad because not only do u have a weird mass of cells producing skin pigment in the brain, u also have a mass of cells stealing nutrients from the rest of the brain, which can lead to strokes etc.
4) tumors can be weird and suddenly decide they want to do completely different functions to their original function, for example some lung cancers often decide they want to become hormone producing cells instead of lung cells and they can produce hormones like PTH or ADH, which can cause your body to dissolve your bones causing way to much calcium in the blood, leading to things like kidney failure, or the hormones can tell your kidneys to hold onto all the water and not filter any out, making you fluid overloaded and sodium deficient which can lead to seizures, respiratory depression and coma.
5) the cancer diseases mentioned in point 4) are apart of a term called para neo plastic syndromes. These refer to diseases that are associated with a cancer but can not be attritubted to the location of the tumor and where it is invading/compressing. The syndromes mentioned in point 4) are called endocrine paraneoplastic syndromes as these are diseases that involve the cancer cells developing the new ability to produce hormones like endocrine cells do.
Other PNP syndromes can be caused by the immune system trying to attack the cancer but getting confused between cancer cells and healthy cells (and these can be everywhere in the body, not just the same organ the cancer is in), because unfortauntely cancer is your own cells, it’s not some foreign invader, so the immune system can get confused and cause damage elsewhere in the body. An example of this is myasthenia gravis which can cause the immune system to “attack” a specific type of nerve the in body that controls things like muscles. As a result patients may get similar symptoms to strokes like limb weakness, speech issues, facial weekness, double vision. Eventually the syndrome can even affect the nerves that innervate the diaphragm (the breathing muscle), leading to respiratory depression and death
All of these reasons combined can lead to multiple organ failure and death
As to why we can’t just cut them out constantly, it’s because they can grow back very fast, and surgery isn’t without its own risk, and repeated surgeries is just begging for an infection to get in there or the patient to bleed out on the table, just further compromising the patient. Cancers also love to overrun the healthy tissue to the point that removing the cancer will compromise what’s left of the organ and it will likely fail. Cancers also love growing heaps of extra blood vessels to support there desire to grow rapidly, these blood vessels aren’t like normal healthy blood vessels that follow a pattern that we have spent 100’s of years studying and learning there normal paths. As such cutting the tumours out isn’t just like regular surgery where a surgeon can just study anatomy textbooks to know where the blood vessels go and what is what and what they need to cut, instead the tumor is unique and will have a very inefficient but dense jungle of blood vessels which have to be sorted through to know what is supplying the healthy tissue and what is supplying the tumor, otherwise the surgeon may accidentally cut the wrong vessel and send the healthy part of the organ into organ failure or cause massive blood loss… killing the patient
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