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Cancer 2001227
Name: William R.
Status: Student
Age: 17
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
Why is cancer such a deadly disease? I mean, what are
the properties of cancer that make it so hard to cure? All it is
uncontrolled cellular mitosis, but isn't there any way to interrupt the
mitosis (e.g. with colchicines, I did my research) besides killing the
transformed cell with chemotherapeutic drugs? What is the actual "thing"
that kills you in cancer, is it some sort of toxin (just my
hypothesis)?
Thank you for your time in answering my question, it is a
great service you and the many scientists at ANL are doing for curious
future scientists, thank you.
Replies:
Cancer is uncontrolled cell division as you know. I believe using
colchicine
would also interfere with mitosis in regular cells so that would not be
good.
Cancer kills in a few different ways, but it usually interferes with the
working of cells in the vicinity. Sometimes there are just so many cells
that they pile up and crowd out the normal cells which affects the working
of
the organ. Sometimes in the case of brain cancer, there just is not any
room
for growth because the skull does not expand and the brain gets squished.
In
the case of leukemia or blood cancer, the blood is flooded with immature
cells that do not work the way they should and also they do not leave room
for
normal cells. In this case, people die of infections or spontaneous
hemorrhage because they have no functioning white blood cells or no
platelets
for clotting.
vanhoeck
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Update: June 2012
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