Cancer 101: Your Quick Guide to the Basics of Cancer
Cancer often strikes fear in the hearts of anyone who even hears the word. This is largely due to the lack of knowledge about the topic, despite the fact that everyone has heard about this devastating disease. When it comes to cancer, it pays to know everything you possibly can about cancer prevention, treatment, and causes. We’ve condensed important information to help you better understand cancer.
1. What Is Cancer?
In short, cancer happens when cells in the body mutate and grow out of control. “Cancer” describes more than one hundred diseases. It comes in many forms, including:
Brain
Breast
Cervical
Colon
Leukemia
Lung
Prostate
And more
No matter how many forms of cancer there are, they share common characteristics, such as crowding out normal cells.
2. How Is It Formed?
When the cancerous cells multiply, a tumour can grow and interfere with regular body function. Tumours that stay in one place and show limited growth are generally considered to be benign. Dangerous, or malignant, tumours form when two things occur:
A cancerous cell manages to move through the blood or lymphatic system, destroying healthy tissue.
That cell divides and grows, making new blood vessels to “feed” itself.
Gene mutations are not caused by one common factor. Cancer formation relies on certain risk factors, including your alcohol intake, whether you smoke tobacco, your exposure to radiation, hormones, consumption of carcinogenic materials, age, weight, and diet. Even though many of those factors are not in your control (such as age), you can control certain risk factors (your diet).
3. What Are the Common Treatments?
The type of treatment depends on the individual, the cancer type, and how far along the cancer has progressed. The most common treatments for cancer are surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Surgery is used to cut out the cancer, chemotherapy refers to the use of drugs to kill cancer cells or slow their growth, and radiation is used to kill or slow the growth of cancer cells.
4. How Can We Prevent It?
According to healthcare experts, prevention is more than half the battle. It is estimated that 90 percent of all diagnosed cancer cases could be prevented with a focus on healthy lifestyle choices. Most of these changes are simple and straightforward:
Predominately eat a plant-based diet consisting of fruits, vegetables, beans, and whole grains.
Avoid refined sugar and processed meats and limit your dairy intake.
Do not take up harmful habits like smoking.
Drink no more than one alcoholic beverage a day.
Exercise at least 150 minutes per week.
Maintain a healthy BMI.