If you have cancer in a certain organ (like liver cancer) why can’t you just remove the infected organ and be cancerfree again?
In: Biology
In some cases that can be done. In other cases, the cancer has already spread to other organs
You can. They cut out my thyroid with the cancer, no cancer now.
But cancer can travel, or come back. Also, most organs you die without, so it’s not a great option. Plus the cancer can be in a location that could be hard to get at.
Cancers become bad news once they metastasize, or spread, to the rest of the body. At this point, they can be in many different places and be microscopic in size that removing them is not feasible.
Cancers that have not spread can be cut out.
You can, if it’s caught early enough, especially if the cancer is localized only to that organ. For example, thyroid cancer and melanoma (a type of skin cancer) can be incredibly deadly, but if caught early, you can simply remove the cancerous mole, or the thyroid, and you’re cured. The complications come when the cancer (uncontrolled replication of cells) spreads to other parts of the body (brain, blood, lymph nodes, other organs, etc.).
Also, just removing organs isn’t that easy. You can’t just remove a whole organ and be scotch free, in most cases. You need a liver (or at least part of it), you need a stomach, brain, esophagus, cervix, etc. You can live without breasts, uterus, prostate, thyroid, but there’s many you just can’t.
(cancer biologist / oncologist here)
* Cancer likes to infiltrate other areas and where this has happened is not always clear.
* Removing the organ might pose too much risk (e.g. you need your lungs) – this is why chemo and radiation often occur prior to any surgical removal
But yeah generally surgical removal is very effective it just depends on what kind of cancer it is, how far advanced it is, how clear the surgical margins would be, etc.
For example, breast cancer is treated rather aggressively with surgical removal of the effective tissue (so much that in some cases like dcis its considered to have an overtreatment problem)
Well, in a sense you can. (Assuming it’s an organ we can reliably remove or transplant.) The trouble is that cancer cells often don’t stay in one place. We might say that you have liver cancer because there is a distinct tumor in your liver–but at an advanced stage, tumor cells can have migrated to many other organs through the bloodstream and lymphatic system. Even though every organ except the liver is doing fine right now, just transplanting in a healthy liver won’t solve the problem. Without treatment, you’d get more tumors throughout the body.
From my own experience with a family member, one of the main reasons they wont do transplants on most (active) cancer patients is because of the immune suppressors that they’d be required to take.
You can…if a body can survive without it.
Take Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. It metastases (spread) three places, generally, the spinal fluid, the testes (in males) and the ovaries (in females).
Spinal fluid is treated with chemotherapy and the brain might get radiation. The testes and ovaries can be removed surgically because if the cancer remains there it can cause another cancer and spread from there
Tumors tend to have a lot of blood supply. They take over the surrounding area and cause a lot of blood vessels to grow to feed the tumor. The bad part about this is that sometimes cells will break off the tumor and get swept up into the blood stream. From there, they will take root wherever they land, and can grow new secondary tumors. These secondary tumors are called metastases, and once you hit that stage, surgical removal is pretty much only an option for the largest masses, or those which are directly threatening an organ. Chemo and radiation are used to kill off these rogue tumor cells, and the beginnings of new tumors.
If you remove the original tumor before it metastacises, you can ‘cure’ the disease. This happens frequently with breast cancers; they remove as much breast tissue as possible. In many cases, this can be the end of the cancer. But a lot of times the cancer returns for one reason or another, at which case they remove any tumors they can, and treat the rest with chemo and radiation.
Well, given that all the organs are connected by various systems, not least of which is the blood vessels, AND given that most of them have to do with taking something out of, or adding something to the blood, or both, its not quite as simple as all that. Furthermore, its not like you can just get your liver whipped out, or decide that eating is no longer required and bin your stomach off willy nilly. The reason some organ cancers are such a bastard, is because you literally need those things unless you want to be dependent on some artificial alternative, like bags and tubes outside the body, which can be a real drag on ones quality of life, and some of those organs have literally no available replacement or stop gap that could go in their place. Sure, dialysis for kidneys is a thing, but most of the other organs cannot have their operations taken over by machinery, and those that can require a person to be constantly connected to some pretty bloody complicated medical tech. Its not like they can leave the hospital after the removal, all hunky dory and happy to be cancer free, because if they get disconnected from the machinery keeping them alive, its game the hell over.
No, its a very complicated situation, and thats before you get into the issue of cancers spreading via the blood vessels or by other systems in the body. Its usually better to kill the cancer while its in a specific location in the body, before it starts to migrate, than remove an entire organ or chunk thereof.
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