Question: Im interested in cancer too and want to learn more, so what is the first thing to know about cancer?

Natalia Brodaczewska answered on 16 Mar 2020:

Oh, this is a very difficult question because there are so many interesting things to know about cancer! I think one thing that many people still don’t realise is that every cancer is different. There are diseases which are caused by one thing – like maybe one of our genes gets changed and because of that we can’t produce one type of protein and our bodies don’t work as they should. But cancer is much more complicated – it is caused and influenced by many different factors. It usually takes many changes in the DNA to make cancer happen. Some of them we may be born with – maybe the change occurred in one of our parents and we inherited it. Others happen later in our life. Sometimes they happen spontaneously – this means that they happen by chance. Every now and then our cells make a random mistake as they make copies of the DNA and this mistake gets passed on to the next generation of cells. Some changes are influenced by our environment – if somebody is more exposed to sun than somebody else, they may have a higher chance of getting more mistakes in their skin cells and because of that getting skin cancer. This is the same for smoking, drinking alcohol or even our diet – some foods like processed meats have been found to cause higher risk of cancer. But we can never say for sure if somebody will get a cancer and what kind of cancer it will be. And even two patients with the same type of cancer, like for example lung cancer, can have very different changes in their DNA and because of this they should receive different treatment. Scientists still have lots to discover to understand how is it that some people get cancer and others don’t and some respond to treatment better than others but we are sure of one thing – no two cancers are exactly the same!