27
Feb
Feb
What’s cellular nature of cancer of the lungs? I’m trying to find out how cells cause cancer in the lungs?
Answer:
As with any cancer, what happens is that abnormal cells divide at an uncontrollable rate and overtake normal cells. In the case of lung cancer, we'll assume that the patient was a lifelong smoker and the toxins caused a mutation in some of the cells. These mutated cells are missing a piece at the end of each chromosome that gets shorter with each division and when it's absolutely gone the cell knows to cease duplicating. Because this “timer” is missing on the mutated (cancerous) cells, they never stop dividing. This basic concept is the same no matter what form of cancer you're speaking about. What differs is where the cancer is, which determines whether a tumor is formed, healthy cells in the blood are depleted, or organs are slowly overtaken and become unable to function.
This entry was posted
on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Cancer Q&A.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or TrackBack URI from your own site.