Cancer affects 1 in 3 people.You probably know people who have been affected by cancer. It’s a pretty big problem. If we want to cure or prevent cancer, we need to deeply understand how it works.
I read that dogs can smell the early stages of cancer in humans, which is pretty interesting.
What is cancer?
Cancer is a disease in which some of the body’s cells grow uncontrollably and spread to other parts of the body. Cancer can start almost anywhere in the human body, which is made up of trillions of cells.
What causes cancer?
Cancer develops when the body’s normal control mechanism stops working. Old cells do not die and instead grow out of control, forming new, abnormal cells.
OK, but how exactly does it work?
The transformation of a normal cell into cancer is akin to a chain reaction caused by initial errors, which compound into more severe errors, each progressively allowing the cell to escape more controls that limit normal tissue growth. This rebellion-like scenario is an undesirable survival of the fittest, where the driving forces of evolution work against the body’s design and enforcement of order. Once cancer has begun to develop, this ongoing process, termed clonal evolution, drives progression towards more invasive stages.[91] Clonal evolution leads to intra-tumour heterogeneity (cancer cells with heterogeneous mutations) that complicates designing effective treatment strategies.
So how do cells copy?
- Mitosis – all of our cells die after a certain period of time. So our existing cells need to keep replicating and copying and creating new cells.
(The other important process to know is Meiosis which is when cells create daughter cells (Sperm and Egg cells) with unique genetic information)
Amazing Facts
Some cells, like skin cells, are constantly dividing. We need to continuously make new skin cells to replace the skin cells we lose. Did you know we lose 30,000 to 40,000 dead skin cells every minute? That means we lose around 50 million cells every day. This is a lot of skin cells to replace, making cell division in skin cells is so important. Other cells, like nerve and brain cells, divide much less often.
- Heart muscle cells: 40 years.
- Intestinal cells (excluding lining): 15.9 years.
- Skeletal muscle cells: 15.1 years.
- Fat cells: 8 years.
- Hematopoietic stem cells: 5 years.
- Liver cells: 10-16 months.
- Pancreas cells: 1 year.
How do DNA and cells actually copy?
This is amazing that I want to write more about. Basically DNA is made of a genetic code. The instructions in a gene that tell the cell how to make a specific protein. A, C, G, and T are the “letters” of the DNA code. The DNA is split and then the opposite letters are joined to create the new code.
Errors in Copying
If you make a photocopy of something, and then take another photocopy, the quality is going to deteriorate. Copies of copies can have problems. The same happens with human cells. Sometimes problems happen when the cells are dividing.
Sometimes errors do happen and the body has some amazing processes to identify these errors and fix them. The process works amazing well most of the time. But occaisionally some errors do happen. We’re human.
What causes these errors? and therefore cancer?
Errors are happening all the time. With the huge number of copying that is going in in your body all the time it is inevitable. You can get cancer any day.
There is nothing that actually causes cancer apart from this process going wrong. There are just other things that impact this process and increase the likelihood of things going wrong.
Smoking, food, sun damage, alcohol, radiation etc., are not the sole cause cancer, they just make your body’s environment operate in suboptimal conditions which means that errors are more likely to happen and your body is less able to fix them.
Cancer can also happen without any of these external factors and occur totally randomly.
How do you prevent cancer?
You can’t prevent it but you can support your body and take care of it so that it is an ideal environment for your body’s processes to happen. This means that errors happen less frequently happen and if they do your body can fix it more easily.
– Exercise – it naturally cleans out your body and improves the processes
– Eat well and healthily
– Sleep well – it repairs your body naturally
– Do not put poisons into your body – such as alcohol, and tabacco
– Have fun and enjoy life
– Keep learning
– Have lots of friends and care about other people
The same is true as a cure for people who are in the early stages of cancer.
I have a load of other interesting questions about cancer. I originally started writing this article because I read that dogs can detect cancer in patients. I am also interested in learning how cancer really works and how we can identify cancer and what are the possible cures and ways to treat it. I’m also interested in understanding how the body works and how our immune system works. The body is amazing, it is a work of nature that is pure genius, the product of millions of 3.5 billion years of evolution (we know that because we have evidence of fossils from that time). I think the body is a goldmine of information that we don’t really understand that well and in understanding it we can learn a lot of useful lessons that we can use in other fields.
