• Question: how many types of cancer are there?

    Asked by wrightm11 to Amar, Ana, Andrea, Leah, Matt on 11 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by lolypop, annafrancis893, icecream19, cherry1, cupcake94, , maryclevergirl.
    • Photo: Anastasia Wass

      Anastasia Wass answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      There are loads of types of cancer! As far as I know you can get cancer of every part of the body, this is because cancer is caused by mutated cells and cells make up every organ. The rarest type of cancer I know of is heart cancer, there are only a couple of cases of heart tumours but the few there are show that even this really important muscle isn’t perfect!

    • Photo: Andrea Hanvey

      Andrea Hanvey answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      currently cancer research UK state that there are over 200 different types of cancer

    • Photo: Leah Fitzsimmons

      Leah Fitzsimmons answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Doctors group cancers into types based on their common features such as; where in the body they occur, which genes have gone wrong in the cancer cells or what treatments the patient is likely to respond to. However in truth, although tumours have common features every cancer is slightly different. This is why doctors do lots of tests on cancer patients to see how best to treat them, because they can’t tell just by knowing what type of cancer they have. This is also why researchers are always looking to find out new things about different cancers.

    • Photo: Matthew Lam

      Matthew Lam answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      As Andrea pointed out the best estimate is around 200 but there could be many more.

      We currently define cancers by what part of the body they originated from (skin, lung, brain, breast etc.) but our system of classifying cancers isn’t 100% accurate. This means that there could be other cancer types which we assume to be one type of cancer but could be different versions of the cancer.

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