What is cancer

What is cancer - Hela cells and cell suicide

What is cancer? The easiest explanation is hack. However, not all bumps are cancer. There are benign tumors. Diagnosis is made through biopsy. It is a biopsy that removes a part of the hump and observes it with a microscope. If normal cells are seen, benign tumors and if cancer cells are seen, they are malignant tumors.

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So how do normal cells and cancer cells differ?

In 1951, a woman named Henrietta Lacks in Baltimore, USA, found a doctor with vaginal bleeding and weight loss. Histological examination revealed end-stage cervical cancer. Lack died within 8 months of diagnosis. However, cancer cells removed from her body were passed on to researchers at nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital, who used her cancer cells to successfully cultivate cancer cells permanently in vitro.

The HeLa cell, the most widely used cancer cell in the world today in cancer research laboratories, was born. It was named after two letters in the first and last name of the donor of the cell, Henrieta Lax. Although the owner of the cell has passed over half a century of her death, her cancer cells have survived immortal life over time and space, repeating thousands of times and tens of thousands of divisions. So far, scientists from all over the world have weighed in at least 20 tons of HeLa cells grown in the laboratory. Hela cells are capable of infinite cleavage if the nutrient and temperature of the test media are maintained properly.

However, vertebrate cells, including humans, die if they divide more than 50 times, no matter how vigorous the divisive ability is.

Genetically, normal cells are designed to die automatically after a reasonable period of time. This is called 'apoptosis' in academic terms. The background of the introduction of apoptosis through evolution is simple. When a large number of cells gather to maintain life as an individual, inevitably, defective cells are inevitably produced. Cellular suicide is a means of protecting individuals by deliberately inducing the death of so-called old and diseased cells, which tend to be cancer cells.

It is a great martyrdom that a cell protects an individual by choosing death. Cellular suicide is an elaborate evolution of life so that a multi - celled creature made up of as many as 60 trillion cells can survive while maintaining an orderly function over an average life expectancy of 80 years.

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Cells that make up the human body have a unique lifetime.

For example, erythrocytes and skin cells have a life span of about one month. Muscle cell life is about four months. It is genetically programmed to die by itself when it reaches its end of life. This is a cell suicide. Even if I appear in front of you four months later, there is no difference in my appearance. However, the muscles of the arms and legs that make up my body actually have changed. In this way, the human body kills old, diseased cells that have reached the end of their lives, and uses the nutrients that we ingest to produce endless, young and fresh cells.

Cancer cells are a kind of defective product that does not work at all because of the control mechanism of cell apoptosis that works in normal cells. Proliferate indefinitely until the life of the individual is broken. The nutrients to return to the normal cells alone. The mass of cancer grows bigger, but the body goes dry. The most common symptom in most cancers is weight loss. This is why cancer treatment is difficult. If the cancer spreads beyond the initial stage, the surgeon will be able to resuscitate any residual cancer cells scattered around even if the cancerous mass visible to the eye is sufficiently ablated.

Why do bad cells that do not kill cell suicide occur in normal cells?

What you are involved in here is smoking, radiation, ultraviolet rays, germs, viruses, asbestos, and dioxin and other carcinogens that you are familiar with. When they attack normal cells and cause damage to genes that control cell suicide, they turn into cancer cells. From birth, the gene itself is fragile, sometimes resulting in cancer. In any case, cancer cells always arise in our body. This is the same moment. It is estimated that thousands of cancer cells are inevitably produced every day even in healthy people because there are so many cells.

It seems a lot, but even if 6,000 cancer cells occur among 60 clams, the defect rate is only one in 100 billion. Even if cancer cells are created, there is no reason to worry. It is because of the immune function of our bodies including white blood cells. Among white blood cells, lymphocytes called NK cells (Natural Killer Cell) are particularly important.

It travels every corner of the body and finds cancer cells and destroys them. Each cell identifies self-recognizing protein fragments attached to the cell surface. It is a type of resident registration card proving that cells are the official people belonging to the state of my body. Cancer cells are a type of transplanted person who lacks some of their social security numbers. NK cells are found and kill them. The antibodies you know can not kill cancer cells.

Antibodies are produced by B lymphocytes under the orders of T lymphocytes among white blood cells. T lymphocytes circulate around the body and look at each cell they meet to see if they have the wrong number on their ID card. It is a totally different heterologous protein from its own body and genetically. This is the outcome of intrusion from the outside, such as bacteria or viruses. B lymphocytes are re-infiltrated once the bacteria and viruses are remembered to make a lot of anti-antibody missiles.

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However, cancer cells are the spy inside my body. Like cells or bacteria, the cell surface does not have the wrong number. T lymphocytes recognize cancer cells as my body, just like fetuses in the womb of a pregnant woman. This is the tragedy of mankind. If you are able to carry out a mass attack at once like an antibody, you do not have to worry about cancer, but you have to check the cancer cell every day by moving NK cells one by one. Very inefficient.

Therefore, if the NK cell function is disturbed for some reason, or if the cancer cells are so large that the NK cells are overwhelmed, the cancer cells will form the tumor, which is what we are talking about. It is not surprising that human immunity has evolved to focus on T lymphocytes or B lymphocytes to kill bacteria or viruses than NK cells to kill cancer cells. It is because bacteria and viruses are more dangerous than cancer cells, which threatened human survival for tens of thousands of years without antibiotics or vaccines.

Cancer is confidential in nature. This is because they are camouflaged as normal cells. Then proceed slowly. It takes about 7 years for a single cancer cell to grow into a 0.5 cm diameter tumor, the smallest unit that can be detected by various imaging tests, including CT (Retsky 1997). 3 cm tumors should not be funny.

At least 27 billion cancer cells must be collected to be this size. It should take 10 years from the first cancer cell. The reason cancer is so scary is that one cancer cell begins to develop symptoms after it has grown for 10 years, avoiding the attack of white blood cell. When symptoms like this are found, it is often late in most cases.

Since then, the cancer cells do not stay in the form of a hump, but they spread through the blood vessels and lymph and spread throughout the body. This is a phenomenon of metastasis. In fact, without metastasis, cancer is not afraid. If it grows up, it will be removed, and if it grows up, it will be enough if you remove it again.

However, when there is transition, it is mostly helpless from then on. Even if the size of the original tumor is small, it is classified as terminal cancer if metastasis is found in other organs. Surgery does not contribute significantly to the survival rate. There are two misconceptions people have about cancer.

First, cancer is a terrible disease, but I do not think I will get cancer.

I wonder. What is the likelihood of cancer, whether it is gastric cancer or liver cancer, now that Koreans are born and die? Surprisingly, it is close to 50%. It is an estimate based on even those who do not know and die even though they have cancer. In other words, if one of the two Koreans is living, it means that one day they will get cancer. Cancer is a very common disease and no one can be an exception to cancer.

Second, cancer is an incurable disease.

Many still believe in cancer as an incurable disease. It is not true at all. One in four Koreans die from cancer. However, one out of every two people has cancer. What does this mean? Let's assume that there are 40 million Koreans. The number of cancer patients is 20 million, and the number of cancer deaths is 10 million. Half of all cancer patients are already cured with current medical technology.

Here, cure does not mean that you lived a few years after the treatment, such as surgery, but it means that you have lived to the same lifespan as someone who has not been cancer. It literally means that the treatment is finished cleanly. So what is the half-dead cancer patient and what is the half-life cancer patient who survived? What did you estimate life and death? The correct answer is early detection. Half cancer survivors who have been diagnosed early will die, and half of the cancer survivors who die early will die.

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Medically, early detection means finding a hump in my body when it does not hurt, when symptoms do not appear. If you find a hospital where you are sick, it is often not early detection. This is very important. It takes ten years to grow a single cancer cell to a diameter of 3 cm, which causes symptoms, because we do not know that cancer is growing in my body just because it is not sick.

The strategy for cancer is clear. I want to argue that I should focus on early detection rather than prevention. It is not easy to prevent cancer. There is no obvious preventive measure except for one thing that is not smoking. I can not afford to go to the airy countryside for decades to live alone. Even now, hundreds of carcinogens are pouring into our bodies through air and food.

With the improvement of the average life expectancy, it is getting longer and longer to live with old and diseased cells in the body. Due to increasing stress, the immunity of modern people is gradually falling. It can not be free from the chaebol president or the national capital. However, even a small country in Africa has never heard of a country whose head of state is killed by cancer during his tenure and elects his successor as an election.

Why? They also have cancer. However, it is because the attending physicians find cancer every year from head to toe early. Do not forget to spend a lot of money and spend time examining the areas that are most common when you are not sick. Early detection is the best way to overcome cancer