Cancer. There are very few words which inspire fear in us quite like this one. That fear is in part, justifiable, as cancer will affect everyone, whether directly or indirectly. In 2014, 357,000 people in the UK were diagnosed with some form of cancer, and 163,000 lost their lives to the disease. It is estimated that the number of those diagnosed with cancer worldwide will rise from 14.1 million in 2012 to 23.6 million by the year 2030. With this being said however, there are currently 7 million people living in the UK with cardiovascular disease, and it kills around 160000 people annually, arguably this makes this a far more common disease that kills just as many people. So why doesn’t the same aura of fear surround heart disease? I believe it is partially to do with how difficult cancer is to understand: what is it, what causes it and why hasn’t it been cured yet? Therefore I have elected to write this blog to answer these questions in a manner those of us without medical degrees will understand. Hopefully I will also be able to clear up some of the many misconceptions surrounding the disease, and maybe even bust some of the myths that seem to constantly resurface on social media!
But first, a brief introduction to cancer, and some terms you may have heard used. Cancer is not one disease, but hundreds. The only thing that links them all is that they share several common traits. Essentially, all cancers originate from cells, the microscopic building blocks of your body. Hundreds of different cells make up your body, which are organised into the tissues that make up our organs. These cells are made by an existing cell copying itself in a process called cell division. The body usually controls this process very tightly, with each individual cell only dividing in response to strict orders. Cancerous cells have stopped responding to these signals and divide continuously, producing a ball of cells called a neoplasm. If this neoplasm grows into a detectable lump, we call it a tumor (which is just Latin for swelling). Neoplasms and tumors can either be described as benign (where it stays in the same area and is often harmless, like a mole on the surface of the skin) or malignant (where it has infiltrated other tissues, and may even have become mobile and moved to a completely different part of the body, a process called metastasis, this is significantly more dangerous).
Any cell in the body can become cancerous, from a brain cell to a blood cell, and this is in part why the disease is so complicated. These cells become cancerous in a vast amount of different ways, and in becoming cancerous can cause massively different symptoms, they can even spread in a different manner! As well as this, there are so many ways that an individual cell can become cancerous that even cancer cells from the same tissue will be surprisingly different from each other. It is for this reason that the study of cancer is such a herculean task, but is also what makes it so fascinating.
The C word 