• Question: if reasearchers found a cure for cancer at the early stages of cancer then why can't they extend and enhance that 'process' to cure it at later stages?

    Asked by devanparmar to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 21 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      Later stage cancers are bigger and so take longer to kill, they may also spread to other organs in the body (metastasis), which means instead of one tumour there may be hundreds. Together these two factors make later treatment much much harder.

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      The best cure for early-stage cancer is surgery! When cancer first starts out, it’s a distinct, hard lump with clear boundaries, and it’s quite easy to separate it away from the healthy parts of the body. A doctor can just cut it away with a knife and it’s gone! Even if there are a few cells left in the body, a few doses of chemotherapy will get rid of them, before they can cause any more harm.

      Late stage cancer is completely different. The tumour gets bigger, and the boundaries start to blur, so it’s hard to tell where the tumour ends and healthy tissue begins. Even if we try to cut it out, which we do, there’s almost sure to be lots of cancer cells left over. And sometimes it’s gotten so spread out that we can’t take it out by surgery anymore. The worst case is in metastasis, as Peter said – at a late stage, some cancer cells start coming unstuck from the main tumour, and swim all through the body in the blood. They can then stick anywhere and everywhere, and start a new tumour there. By the late stage, you’re not dealing with one tumour anymore – you’re dealing with the whole body!

      What if we just give more doses of chemotherapy and radiotherapy? That should kill all the cancer cells, right? Yes – but it would also kill you! The chemicals and radiation used to treat cancer are most effective in killing fast-growing cells. Cancer cells are one kind of fast-growing cell, so they do get killed – but so are your bone marrow cells, where all your blood cells are produced! Too much chemotherapy and radiotherapy leaves a person anaemic, with a destroyed immune system, and just generally feeling like they’ve been poisoned (they also lose their hair). Having your bone marrow cells killed is also, apparently, extremely painful. If you do that to someone who is already suffering from cancer, chances are they won’t survive. That’s why our normal strategies don’t work in late-stage cancer, and we have to come up with something else.

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      Yes, cancer changes the longer you have it – here’s some information about how cancer grows http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-help/about-cancer/what-is-cancer/grow/how-a-cancer-grows

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      Later stage cancer is a lot more complicated, as Peter and Lyn have mentioned. Whereas early cancer can be operated on, later stage cancer is more likely to have spread and cause more issues. This means that the treatment is usually different for it.

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