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Invasive Crvical Cancer Essay

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About 12,820 new cases of invasive cervical cancer will be diagnosed in America every year (5). This is out of the 1,685,210 people diagnosed with cancer every year. About 39.6% of the US population will contract cancer in their lifetime (10). With so many people affected by cancer, it is beneficial to understand how cancer works. However, cancer is a very complex disease that scientists are still trying to understand themselves. Moreover, cancer can be a very frightening disease because of its difficulty to treat, and its lethality. Understanding the pathology and history of cancer can be beneficial to help understand the inevitable cancer diagnosis of yourself or a loved one.
First and foremost, cancer comes from changes in the genetic …show more content…

When you change the genetic makeup of a cell, you change the way it functions. When you change the genetic code for cell cycle regulation, you can develop cancer.
Common features among all types of cancer are metastasis, redirecting blood flow, unregulated cell proliferation, genomic instability and hiding from the immune system. The most dangerous aspect of cancer is that the disease can turn metastatic. 90% of cancer deaths come from metastasis (13). Metastasis is when somatic cells of the body have mutations in the genes that control cell placement. For example, if someone develops lung cancer, several cells in the tumor may leave the lung because the regulatory proteins that keep cells in place are no longer being made. This cluster of cells can travel to any part of the body and start to make tumors there. This is why someone can have lung cancer, but have tumors in their brain. In addition, tumors redirect blood flow so the cancerous cell population can stay alive. Furthermore, unregulated cell proliferation is when cancer cells divide despite signals to stop, and this is what causes tumors. Additionally, genomic instability is when your genes are in the wrong order in your genome. Your genome is all of your genes put together. If you think of a gene as an instruction to build a car part, the genome is the instruction manual to build the car. In cancer, cells have faulty instructions for cell

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