• Question: What is the most dangerous thing about cancer?

    Asked by Candela to Max, Ben on 6 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Ben Mulhearn

      Ben Mulhearn answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      Because cancer can spread to many parts of the body it can cause organs to dysfunction and therefore cause death. If cancers break of and spread they are known as METASTATIC. This is the most dangerous thing about cancer.

    • Photo: Max Jamilly

      Max Jamilly answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      Cool question! I agree with Ben that metastatic cancer is really dangerous. Another major risk comes from something called tumour heterogeneity. A tumour is the nerve centre of cancer – it’s where all the dangerous cancer cells grow. But these tumours are heterogenous – they aren’t entirely the same, not even within the same tumour. So just because a cancer medicine works on one part of the tumour, it may not work on the rest of the tumour. This makes cancer really difficult to treat.

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