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Asked by charlieparker to Matt, Leah, Amar, Ana, Andrea on 9 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by cupcake94, tylerk, simikohli96, laurenbrammer1407, sophieb, manofsteel, maryclevergirl.
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Andrea Hanvey answered on 9 Mar 2014:
1) cancer can harm people in various ways. if the tumour is in an organ and particularly large it can stop the organ from working properly. So if it was in the kidney it would affect your blood as the kidney is the bodies filter.
if the cancer has spread around the body it is more harmful to the patient. firstly they have to have more aggressive treatment. radiotherapies and chemotherapies which make people extremely poorly. these treatments knock out the bodies immune system. this means the patient could become seriously ill from infection as well as the cancer. secondly if the tumour has spread to other organs it can stop them working properly. cancer also causes patients mental harm as well as physical.
2) Well you could say if cancer is caught early enough and completely removed its no longer harmful. this is known as staging. In the UK we have screening programs for cervical, bowel and breast cancers which are in place to catch cancer early so it is not harmful to patients. on the whole the earlier the cancer is caught the less harmful to the patient, this however is not the case for all cancers.
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Anastasia Wass answered on 10 Mar 2014:
1) Cancer is caused by cells multiplying uncontrollably, this makes them form a lump of cells called a tumour. Tumours can stop organs from functioning.
Some tumours produce hormones or chemicals which can make your body ill. Some cells from tumours can travel round the body and form new tumours in other places, this is how cancer spreads and affects multiple organs.2) If a tumour is caught early enough and removed it wouldn’t cause much harm, it also depends where the tumour is. Skin moles are a type of tumour but they very rarely develop into cancer.
Unfortunately not all tumours can be surgically removed and some are very difficult to detect early. These tumours can be treated with chemotherapy drugs and radiation. -
Amar Joshi answered on 10 Mar 2014:
Hi Charlie,
The other answers cover the questions fairly well. But I have something to add about question 2. One cancer that affects men is prostate cancer and it is quite readily treatable by surgery. However there are risks involved, the main one is that after surgery you may not be able to control how you urinate (the medical word is incontinence). Recently people have looked at lots of skeletons and found evidence of prostate cancers in men living to old ages, and so not shortening their life.
There is quite a lot of debate about whether the benefits of having prostate cancers removed outweigh the risks of the treatment but hopefully this will be resolved by scientists soon.
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Matthew Lam answered on 10 Mar 2014:
I think everyone has covered question 1 pretty thoroughly.
As to your question ‘are all types of cancer harmful?’, I would add that for breast cancer, none of the deaths are due to the tumour in the breast. People that die from breast cancer do so because the cancer spreads to other organs such as the lungs, brain, liver or bones. When this happens we call the disease ‘secondary breast cancer’. It is this form of breast cancer that is responsible for all the deaths from breast cancer (nearly 12,000 people a year in the UK).
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