It doesn't hurt to review the facts about cancer from time to time. If a review such as this prompts someone to get a cancer screening or consider giving up smoking, then the effort is worthwhile. The consequences of developing cancer are downright nasty as cancer remains the number 2 killer in America today. Cancer affects a third of all women and a whopping half of all men based on numbers released by the American Cancer Society.
If you could choose between finding a cure for cancer or a cure for mental illness, which would have the biggest impact? The cure for mental illness would affect more Americans than the cure for cancer. In fact, more Americans are diagnosed with mental illness than cancer. Still, the race for the cure for cancer is on and in full force.
That being said, what cancer do Americans think is the most prevalent? If you asked the average person, the answer might be breast cancer. While breast cancer gets a lot of press coverage, skin cancer is the most diagnosed cancer today. Along with skin cancer and breast cancer, the other top cancers found in Americans according to the American Cancer Society are:
*~Prostate cancer
*~Colon and rectal cancer
*~Endometriosis cancer
*~Kidney cancer
*~Leukemia
*~Lung cancer
*~Melanoma
*~Pancreatic cancer
*~Bladder cancer
*~Thyroid cancer
Is cancer genetic or environmentally driven? While most cancers are programmed into our genetic makeup, many cancers lie under the radar and do not rear their ugly head until you expose them to factors that will set them off. For this reason, if you can avoid certain situations or behaviors that can subject your system to negative consequences, you may never know in your lifetime that you carry cells that want to go nuts.
What makes a cell cancerous? While we might not know exactly what happens, cells in the body have a normal lifetime. A cell in the liver is programmed to perform the functions of the liver and eventually die off and be replaced by a new liver cell. When something goes wrong, the cell never dies and becomes a cancer cell. When the cancer cells start to multiply, they turn into a cancerous tumor. As more cancer cells form in the tumor and begin to divide into more cancer cells, the cancer can quickly spread to other parts of the body.
The cancerous cells don't always stay contained in one room.
They sometimes travel through organ walls and float through the bloodstream until they can destroy or take over other areas. Leukemia, for instance, is a cancer that travels through the blood rather than originating from an organ.
How do you stop these bad cells? The sooner you identify cancerous cells the better your chance to eradicate them.
The other way around also works: the less lifestyle risks you participate in the less you are exposed to ways to alter your body's functions. Some risks that increase your odds with cancer are smoking, drinking, lack of physical activity, and stress. The more common treatments involve removing, killing or reprogramming the cancerous cells such as surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.
If you have risk factors for cancer, think about changing your habits. For more information about cancer go online to the American Cancer Society web site.
Copyright 2005 Canute Dionu. All rights reserved.
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Canute Dionu is the webmaster and operator for United Cancer which is a principal resource for cancer information found on the Internet. Click here to access his archive of
articles: http://www.uncancer.com/archive/.
