Just to clarify, I’ve not posted anything in the past few days because I have been extremely busy, with different things coming up, which meant that I couldn’t write anything as both topics I’ve written about previously, took me around 1-2 hours each, which I had no time slot to fit that in for. I was going to post yesterday when I had some time late at night, but very inconveniently the WIFI was down, and I didn’t end up posting.

Cancer- What is Cancer?

As I mentioned in the previous post, gene mutations can occur all the time, these can be good, or these can be bad. If a cell becomes mutated enough, (around six different mutations to the cell) it will turn into a cancer cell [1]. Cancer is caused by many things, one of them, very rarely though, could be from inherited abnormal genes, another example could be from the tobacco in cigarettes, but It can take a few years for a damaged cell to divide and grow a lot to form a tumour big enough to cause symptoms or to show up on a scan at the doctors [1]. Now that you briefly have an idea of how cancers are formed, let’s take a look at what types of cancers there are out there.

Types of cancer:

There are over 100 types of cancer [2], characterised by abnormal cell growth. Here are the 5 main/ most common generalised types:
Carcinoma – this cancer starts in the skin or in tissues that line or cover internal organs. There are different sub-types, including adenocarcinoma, basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma and transitional cell carcinoma.[1]
Sarcoma – this cancer begins in the connective or supportive tissues such as bone, cartilage, fat, muscle or blood vessels.[1]
Leukaemia – this cancer starts in the blood where tissue such as bone marrow is formed and causes abnormal blood cells to be produced and enter the blood.[1]
Lymphoma and myeloma – this cancer begins in the cells of the immune system.[1]
Brain and spinal cord cancers – these are known as the central nervous system cancers.[1]

Treatments people with cancer (may) require:

Surgery [3]- what happens here depending on the individual’s situation, if the cancer has spread to other parts of the body then its practically impossible to be cancer free just from surgery, but surgery can involve the removal of a tumour, or a whole organ, like for example a mastectomy for breast cancer or a prostatectomy for prostate cancer
Chemotherapy [3]- this is the treatment of cancer with the use of drugs, they target rapidly dividing cells in general (not just cancer cells).
Radiation therapy [3]- this can be used to treat almost every type of cancer out there, it works by using ionising radiation to kill cancer cells leading to the shrinkage of tumours.
Although these aren’t all the treatments out there, these are 3 of the main and most effective treatments out there, but treatments for cancer will likely come with a health issue.

The side effects:

The side effects that come with surgical treatment are quite clear, mainly scarring or loss of complete organs, this can do many things like the loss of one’s sex drive depending on what is removed, but mentally, there’s a huge psychological toll on the person, because of what they’d had to go through.
Chemo therapy and radiation therapy will both effect healthy cells, which means that the (healthy) cells DNA can also get mutated and cause even more problems, but luckily, in most cases, all healthy cells effected by these treatments will repair themselves, like hair loss because of chemotherapy, hair will regrow after a patient finishes with their treatment. Radiation therapy, just like x-rays or any other ‘thing’ involving radiation can cause cells to mutate, which is why its advised to not get an x-ray more than three times a year, as that will increase chances of a cell mutating and possibly becoming cancerous, which is why doctors need to stand behind protective glass (with lead to block the radiation) for example.

Summary

As you have seen from both of these posts, there isn’t really any medication in this world that will have no side effects, there’s been cases where medication was given to people without extensive research being done, and ended up being really bad, like thalidomide, which was made and developed as a sleeping pill in the early 1950s to the early 60s, and later was found to reduce morning sickness in pregnant women, but when it came to birth, basically all women gave birth to a deformed child, and depending on how early in the pregnancy she used thalidomide, depended on how deformed the baby was and whether it survived or not [4]. Luckily, nowadays, for a drug to be accepted, there are many stages and trials the drug will go through and research may take years just to ensure the drug is perfected with the least amounts of side effects as possible.

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References:

Links:
[1]: https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/
[2]: https://www.livescience.com/11041-10-deadliest-cancers-cure.html
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_of_cancer
[4]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/aqa_pre_2011/human

Image references:

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