What causes people to become pale during cancer treatment?
In: Biology
Cancer is caused by the uncontrolled division of cells.
Radiation and chemo both damage the DNA inside cells.
Before a cell divides it does a self-checkup to determine if its DNA is in good enough condition to divide. If a fatal flaw is detected then the cell kills itself through programmed cell death called apoptosis.
This checkup only occurs when a cell is about to divide. So cells that divide frequently will encounter this checkup more often.
Cells that divide frequently are hair cells, bone marrow which makes blood cells, and liver cells.
Hair cells die causing your hair to fall out.
Bone marrow dies which reduces red blood cell count. Less blood equals paler skin.
Liver cells die. Liver is the body’s filter. Less liver cells means more toxins, which impacts the body in a variety of ways.
Targeted radiation treatment can reduce the impact on vital organs.
For higher level treatments the intestinal tissue is impacted causing bowel issues.
A few things.
1) The body is not making enough red blood cells
2) The body loses blood
3)The body is destroying it’s own red blood cells
Most types of cancer treatments like chemo or radiation therapy are essentially an attempt to do extremely unhealthy and even deadly things to the body in hopes that the part of the body that has gone bad dies before the rest of the body does.
You are trying to target how you kill the patient so that right part gets killed first.
There still tends to be quite a lot of collateral damage though.
You can target your death rays and your poison at the cancer as much as you want, the rest of the body is going to take a hit too.
Patients develop all sorts of visible and invisible symptoms from the process.
It is far from perfect, but it beat dying from cancer most of the time.
Most cancer treatments rely on the idea that cancer cells are less durable than regular cells. They kill the cancer by almost killing the patient and hoping the cancer dies first.
This also means people receiving cancer treatment are generally weaker than normal, so they have to be extra careful because diseases they could normally shrug off could be deadly.
Lets say you want to kill this one guy, his name is Bob and he is taking up space and is just the worst. You hate Bob. But you can’t get to him, but you know he is eating is eating a lot and you know where.
So you decide to poisen the food, but since you don’t know what he is eating you are poisening all the food.
Great you will get the little shit. Problem is Sarah and Kim are eating there too, but not as much as Bob.
So you hope he will die before the other two.
In the end Kim and Sarah are sick, like really sick and Bob is hopfully dead.
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