Among many diseases cancer is probably the one that scares the most.
Do we really know what it truly is?
Cancer is a multifactorial disease and can have origin in whatever body site. It consists in the uncontrolled cells proliferation and in their spread in the organism.
It’s a pathology strictly linked to the organism complexity as a result of the accumulation of errors.
In normal conditions the cells proliferate under control factors.
If there is an error inside the DNA sequence, due to a damage or the age, we have regulation mechanism like the p53 protein to replace the old cell with a new one.
When the regulation is modified the result is a proliferation of damaged cells and it could make a tumor.
It’s necessary to clarify that we could have benign or malignant tumor. In the first scenario there isn’t the formation of carcinogenic mass, in the second one we have cancer.
Malignant one once removed could reform, in this case we are in front of a relapse.
During our life the probability to develop a disease is related to the age, getting old means an higher chance to have cancer.
The reason why is that there are more mutations inside the DNA genes.
According to italian association for tumors registration (Airtum) men have fifty percent of probability to get cancer during life, instead women have thirty percent. It doesn’t mean that the tumor will bring certainly to death.
Nowadays we can treat cancer with several type of therapies.
When the surgical treatment is possible often this is the first approach. Suddenly the patient can be subjected to different therapies which kill the cancer cells like chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
The modern medicine has also available treatment like immunotherapy that helps our immune system to fight cancer cells or the hormone therapy that gets the hormones needed for the cancerous cells.
It would be a good habit to get used to prevention. An healthy life style or do more screening exams could make the differences for a better prognosis.
