WHAT IS CANCER?
Millions of people worldwide live with a cancer diagnosis.
Constant research, in the intervention of cancer, is unquestionably necessary. More and more is known about its causes, how it develops and grows, that is, how it progresses. New ways of preventing, detecting and treating cancer are also being studied, always considering the improvement in the quality of life of people with cancer, during and after treatment.
What is Cancer?
Cancer is the abnormal proliferation of cells.
Cancer starts in cells; a collection of cells forms a tissue and, in turn, tissues form the organs of our body. Normally, cells grow and divide to form new cells. In their life cycle, cells age, die and are replaced by new cells.
Sometimes, this orderly and controlled process goes wrong: new cells are formed, without the organism needing it and, at the same time, the old cells do not die. This set of extra cells forms a tumor.
Not all tumors are cancer. Tumors can be benign or malignant.
Benign tumors are not cancer:
• Rarely life-threatening;
• They can generally be removed and often regress;
• Cells in benign tumors do not "spread", that is, they do not spread to surrounding tissues or to other parts of the body (distant metastasis).
Malignant tumors are cancer:
• They are generally more serious than benign tumors;
• They can be life-threatening;
• They can often be removed, although they can grow back;
• Cells from malignant tumors can invade and damage surrounding tissues and organs; they can also break free from the primitive tumor (primitive) and enter the bloodstream or lymphatic system - this is the process of metastasis of cancer cells from the original cancer (primary tumor), forming new tumors in other organs.
The name given to most cancers comes from the initial tumor. For example, lung cancer starts in the lung and breast cancer starts in the breast. Lymphoma is a cancer that starts in the lymphatic system and leukemia starts in white blood cells (leukocytes).
Cancer cells can "travel" to other organs, through the lymphatic system or the bloodstream. When cancer metastasizes, the new tumor has the same type of abnormal cells as the primary tumor. For example, if breast cancer metastasizes to the bones, the cancer cells in the bones will be breast cancer cells; in this case, we are dealing with metastatic breast cancer, not a bone tumor, and should be treated as breast cancer.
