What is cancer?

According to National Cancer Institute at National Institute of Health, Cancer is a disease in which abnormal cells divide without control and are able to invade other tissues.

The environment we live in contains cancer promoting agents such as the UV light from the sun (often long exposure to the sun from sunbathing activity), smoking, asbestos and viruses. About 10-20% of human cancers have viral involvement. Different viral transmissions are via blood products, sexually-transmitted diseases and recreational drugs.

Cancer is disorganized mass composed of malignant cells, disease bioactive molecules, disorganized extracellular matrix, leaky blood vessels and lymph. By hijacking all possible cellular processes especially the cell cycle, developmental genes and proteins to ensure its survival, cancer cells are incredibly adaptable under any conditions. The keys to cancer are the decrease in cell death and increase in cell growth. The causes of cancer are inheritance, environmental factors or both or spontaneous mutations. In the inherited case, the genes are mutated since birth or early life so some people have higher cancer susceptibility. In all cases, healthy cells (germ and somatic cells) are transformed to cancer cells due to in situ accumulated mutations. Common mutated genes are oncogenes such as Ras and ß-catenin and tumour suppressor genes (protect us from cancer) such as Apc and p53.

Sunbathing - use sun cream to protect your cells

Different stages of cancer at the tissue level is the transformation from normal to benign, then carcinoma in situ then malignant stage. At the molecular level, the hallmarks of cancer is acquiring new behaviour which are evading apoptosis (decrease cell death), self-sufficiency in growth signal (can grow by itself), insensitivity to anti-growth signals (resist to anti-cancer signals), tissue invasion and metastasis, limitless replicative potential and sustained angiogenesis (formation of new blood vessels from existing vasculature). Once cancer can be able to metastasize via vasculature and lymph systems, it can evade any tissue or organs and this stage is critical in terms of survival for patients.