• Question: hey can cancer cause blindness is there a cancer that does that?

    Asked by cupcake94 to Amar, Ana, Andrea, Leah, Matt on 14 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Anastasia Wass

      Anastasia Wass answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      I don’t know if there’s a cancer that can specifically cause blindness but some brain tumours can affect the optic nerve (the bit that connects your eyes to your brain). If a tumour pressed on this it could affect your vision.

    • Photo: Amar Joshi

      Amar Joshi answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      There are several different types of eye cancers. Some of them can cause blindness but often they are only spotted when your eyes are checked at the opticians. Often the treatments of eye cancers can cause blindness but only in the eye which has the tumour.

      I don’t think other cancers can cause blindness, and I don’t think the side effects of any chemotherapy causes blindness either.

    • Photo: Leah Fitzsimmons

      Leah Fitzsimmons answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      Eye cancers are rare and don’t always cause you to lose your sight and other cancers can sometimes cause people to have reduced or impaired vision, but this is very usual. Like everywhere else on your body you can have moles or lumps in your eyes that are harmless and will never cause cancer or affect your vision – my optician found a lump in my eye when I was 14 and I had to have it checked to see if it was cancerous, but it turned out to be a little birthmark and totally harmless.

    • Photo: Andrea Hanvey

      Andrea Hanvey answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      The other scientists are right. There is another way that you can lose your sight from cancer. Quite often a skin cancer called a basal cell carcinoma (BCC) develops on the face. The surgery can be quite difficult if the tumour is near the eye. Quite often a surgeon will request something called a frozen section. this happens when the patient is on the operating table under anaesthetic. The surgeon will send the piece of skin with the tumour in. This is rapidly frozen and a section cut at -18 degreez c . this is then hand stained and looked at by a consultant histopathologist down the microscope. The histopathologist will then speak to the surgeon to let them know if all the tumour is out. Quite often a BCC occurs on the nose or round the eye, or eyelid. I have been involved in two frozen sections during my career when the surgeon has sent more skin and its still had tumour in. They have had to stop the operation becasue the BCC has spread into the eye. The only way then to remove the cancer is to remove the patients eye and they have to discuss this with the patient and reschedule for another operation. so its a different example of how someone can lose their sight as a result of cancer.

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