why does cancer kill people?

Question

i mean doesnt aids like stop the immune system from working but what does cancer do to you? and how do you get tumors?

Answer 1

What happens with aggressive cancers is that they pretty much will grow like wild-fire. They usually stop responding to traditional medicinal treatment and people get sent home on palliative care. Palliative care is to help manage their symptoms more and not cure the disease. When this happens, the tumors will grow. Usually people die from a result of that happening. The tumors grow and put pressure on their organs. The extra fluid surrounding the tumors or created by the tumors will clog up the lungs, people get pneumonia and their bodies just shut down. Also if the pressure in the head - Hydrocephaly i believe - will become so great it will press against the receptors for breathing and the person will just slowly stop breathing. Or people will get infections that would not do anything to you or me - but somebody who has cancer - when they have chemo and radiation - that basically KILLS their bone marrow - it wipes out their immune system, so they are suspectible to anything and everything and sometimes these super infections kill them. There are a lot of things that will eventually lead to their death.

Tumors are abnormal cell growth. A carcinogin is something toxic that will cause your normal cells to mutate. Everybody is born with cancer cells in their body it is the carcinogins that they subject their body to that will make some of the cells mutate. Not everybody will get cancer. Some people who smoke for 50 years never end up getting lung cancer where the person like Dana Reeves who never smoked ended up getting lung cancer. Your genetic make-up has a lot to do with it.

Good luck - hope that helped some.

Answer 2

Cancer can kill through many different mechanisms. The most common are nutrient depletion to the rest of the body because the cancer consumes high amounts of nutrients (this is known as cachexia or wasting), and immune dysfunction (possibly again due to nutrient depletion) leading to acute and fatal infections.

The cause of cancer is too large of a subject to even begin to answer here. I can recommend an excellent book by the American Institute for Cancer Research called: "Stopping Cancer Before it Starts". It is available at Amazon.com.

Best wishes and good luck.

Answer 3

This can be answered at the site below.