CANCER | By: Doha Shaabien

CANCER

What is Cancer?

Cancer is one of the serious diseases that caused by uncontrolled growth and division of the abnormal cells in the body. Those cells have the ability to spread and move in the body with the blood or through the lymph system and move to another organ and make tumors  and this case is too hard to be treated.

Cancer formation.

The life cycle of the normal cell ends when it dies through normal process called apoptosis. However, cancer cell doesn’t go through the programmatic death and it continues to grow and divide in abnormal and uncontrolled way to form the tumor. For more understandable, it starts from DNA and genes. Mutations in the DNA can cause damages to the genes that responsible for cell division. So cancer forms when the gene mutations affect the cell ability and prevent it from correcting the damage in the DNA so prevent its death. Once this happened, the cell continues growing.

When this tumor starts in a specific organ it called primary tumor. But once some cells transfer to another organ to create a new tumor on it, this tumor called metastatic tumor.

The tumors that caused by the traveled cancer cells to another organ (metastatic tumor) are the main death cause in the cancer cases while 10% of the cases are died from the primary tumors (non-traveled tumor)

The cause why the malignant cells can transfer through the blood and the small gaps is that malignant cells are more flexible according to the journal Scientific Reports that published in April 2013.

There are more than 100 types of cancer and there are many factors can start the cancer.

There are some of the cancer causes factors:

Carcinogens

Carcinogens like tobacco, asbestos, arsenic, radiation, sun, and gases can damage the cell DNA.

Genes

Babies can inherit genetic mutations from their parents or family members if they are carrying this malfunctioning gene so they have high risk to developed cancer in their bodies sometime in their life.

Age

When people grow up, the risk of getting cancer will be high since the immune system became weaker and the person exposure to many carcinogens in his long life. This is not the basic role for developing cancer in old people; but, the most reasonable causes.

Diseases

Experience some diseases that weaken the immune system like human papillomavirus, hepatitis B and C, and Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can increase the potential of getting cancer.

Cancer symptoms

The symptoms depend on the type of the cancer. Some symptoms can be obvious such as changes colors or shape on breast, testis or skin cancer. However, some kinds of cancer have common symptoms with other diseases or those symptoms are not obvious like brain, pancreas, liver, colon, bladder lung, throat and prostate.

Brain tumor causes headache when it presses the nerves. Hormones defects could be symptom for glands cancer. Coughing, shortness of breath could be indicator for lung cancer. Moreover, unexplained weight loss, Fever, sweating, anemia and many other disorders could be non-obvious symptoms that something wrong is happening inside the body. What symptom exactly? It all depends on the tumor location.

to read more about therapy, diagnosis and how to prevent it, you can visit  http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/info/cancer-oncology/