I know what a tumor is, but can someone explain what terminal cancer is and what is it about cancer that can kill/ cause permanent damage to your body?
In: Biology
Metastasis is the technical term. Basically what happens is that pieces of tumor break off and are spread throughout your body by your circulatory or lymphatic system, and start to grow new tumors wherever they end up.
If they end up in a vital organ like your lungs or your brain or your bone marrow, eventually they grow large enough to interfere with the necessary systems that keep you alive.
A benign tumor is a tumor that for whatever reason can’t spread to any other tissues. It’s still cancer, but it (probably) can’t kill you in and of itself.
I’ll use lung cancer since it is the easiest to make a point with.
Cancer is basically a part of you deciding to grow out of control. That is a tumor. Something like a lung cell starting to multiply out of control. The body only has so much room and organs must be structured as they are to operate properly.
In the case of lung cancer, the cancerous cells start to fill the airways of the lung. The cancerous cells also don’t operate as they should and don’t grow where they should, so they don’t absorb oxygen right either. Eventually, the lungs become more “lung” than airway and you suffocate. With other organs, it simply impairs the function until it fails. There’s also the issue of those cancerous cells getting into the bloodstream and taking root elsewhere, growing in the lymph nodes and getting into the brain and whatnot.
In short, cancerous cells cannot function as normal cells and grow out of control, crushing organs or overtaking them and shutting them down. When enough or an important enough organ fails or enough organs are infected… then it’s only a matter of time, unfortunately. Since the cancer cells are YOUR cells just… not functioning normally, you can’t kill it that easily without killing good cells as well. This is why removal, chemo, and targeted radiation are used. The idea is basically to burn the building and hope that the infestation dies before the host does. Hopefully normal, healthy healing should outlast the cancer cells. It’s also why it’s so hard to develop a cure.
Most often, cancer kills by destroying one or more vital organs, or making you susceptible to massive infection.
So, you can’t live without a functioning liver. Cancer of the liver literally destroys the liver (or pick any major organ). The big problem is that it spreads, so liver cancer can become pancreatic and brain cancer, etc…
If the tumor isn’t growing somewhere immediately deadly, one way they kill is when some loose cells eventually break off and use your bodily systems to travel all over the place starting dozens of tumors in likely fatal places.
Cancer is defined as ‘unregulated cell growth’.
Basically, some cells stop working correctly, and instead of dying or dividing as they are meant to, they constantly grow and grow.
If this is near or inside an important organ, this can damage the organ directly, or take away space and nutrients the organ needs to work properly. When it stops working, you die.
The reason cancer is so deadly though is because it can metastasise. This means that cells can break off the main lump and end up elsewhere – making the chance of some ending up inside or near an important organ very high.
It depends on the exact type of cancer. For some of them the cancer simply takes more nutrients than your body can supply and it causes the other parts of your body to die off. For some kinds of cancers as the tumor grows it will apply pressure and restrictions to various other parts of the body (such as the mother of a person I once knew whose tumor grew so large it sealed her esophagus causing her to choke to death, or a brain tumor which applies pressure on the parts of the brain which control vital functions.) Some cancers remain functional in their original purpose and cause overproduction of the function for their purpose, whereas others contain other mutations that can cause them to produce toxins. Lastly sometimes the immune system, in desparation to remove the cancers, may cease to recognize the difference between self and foreign bodies and may begin attacking the vital organs.
>I know what a tumor is but not why it kills you
A cancerous tumor is a part of your body that will always try to keep growing even if it “squishes”, “eats”, “blocks”, and “starves” the other parts of your body.
What a tumor is, *IS* why it kills you.
Imagine you had skin cancer. Say you get a tumor or something. If the cancer stayed in your skin, and stayed in that tumor, the worst it would do is disfigure you and require you to get it cut out. It wouldn’t be deadly at all. That cancer is made of skin cells, and you have billions of them so losing a few isn’t going to kill you.
Here’s the problem though, that skin is connected via blood vessels and lymphatic vessels that move fluids around your body like blood and lymph. Those cancerous skin cells can hitch a ride on this system, and move to other parts of the body, where they continue to rapidly multiply, forming new tumors.
Im sure you don’t have to imagine how bad it would be if a huge clump of cancerous skin started growing in the middle of your liver, heart, lungs, or brain right? When a cancer spreads to other parts of the body it’s said to have metastasized.
One other factor is that not all cells multiply or reproduce at the same rate. And if a cancerous cell naturally reproduces quickly, it can form quick growing, fast spreading cancers that are very difficult to catch in time. While other cells may grow much more slowly and take decades to do their damage, giving doctors more time to catch them before they spread.
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