Just after the Lantern Festival, there was a bad news, and countless people were in the circle of friends.
Uncle Da, who is partnered with Star Ye Wannian, the nonsense comedy film created by the two has accompanied the growth of several generations, from us to our parents, we can say many classic clips in the movie.
At the end of last year, Uncle Da went to the hospital for physical examination due to heart discomfort and inadvertently found liver cancer, but at this time, the cancer cells had begun to spread. Due to the ineffectiveness of treatment, Uncle Da died at the age of 70. The dead rest in peace, and the living wake up.
Today I'm going to talk to my friends about a topic that we are very taboo about: cancer. This is an era of talking about cancer discoloration, but we should understand cancer in order to better understand our bodies and learn to live healthier.
Here, the book to share with you is called "The King of Diseases". This book details cancer, a disease that affects millions of people, and remains one of the most serious challenges facing the medical community. The author uses detailed historical materials, professional documents, media reports, patient interviews and many other information to explain to us the origin and development of cancer, the history of human struggle against cancer and prevention of cancer.
Cancer: Incurable disease
What is the cause of cancer?
In 1840, the pathologist Rudolf Philsau decided to conduct cancer research using only the evidence that could be observed under the microscope, so-called seeing is believing. This approach also laid the groundwork for modern cancer research.
Philsau proposed a "cell theory" in which he argued that every new cell came from an original cell. He looked at the tumor tissue with a microscope, and he found that the tumor was actually made up of a large number of human cells. Therefore, he believes that the cells of cancerous tissue are the same as normal cells in our body, homologous.
cell division
Then the question arises, since the truth is like this, the so-called original is born from the same root, why is it too urgent to fry each other? Why can cancer cells kill people? The harsh truth is that cancer cells have two major damn properties: first, they don't die, and second, they can replicate indefinitely.
We know that under normal circumstances, the replication of cells is regulated by the surrounding tissues, it only receives growth signals to divide, and stops replication under the action of growth inhibitors, this regulatory process is very critical. Imagine what would happen if cells in the brain continued to replicate uncontrollably. If only people could be smarter, but if the brain grows bigger and bigger, the more it breaks the skull, the picture is too scary.
Unfortunately, cancer cells take precisely this extreme approach. The mutated growth genes make them disobey the command, copy unscrupulously, and can't stop at all. Another fatal trick of cancer cells is that they will not age, normal cells will age, and they will cut themselves off after being damaged, and these mechanisms do not exist in cancer cells.
For the human body, the continuous self-replication of cancer cells and the characteristics of never dying have made them the most difficult enemies of modern medicine, and now understand the crux of its so-called "incurable disease"?
That is to say, cancer comes from within the body, which is the result of the cells going astray, so in addition, are there any external factors that cause cancer? If so, what are these external factors?
Many common substances in life have been shown to be associated with the development of cancer, such as asbestos, benzene, and heavy metals.
So how exactly do these external substances induce the growth of cancer cells? Two steps in a nutshell. First, some toxins, commonly known as "mutagens," can directly alter our DNA. If the mutagen alters the genes involved in cell growth, self-repair, self-destruction, and tissue infiltration, the otherwise normal cell has the potential to turn into cancer cells.
For example, benzene is a substance that we can come into contact with every day, it is found in cigarette smoke, gasoline, wax on furniture, and sometimes even in drinks, but benzene has a strong mutagenesis ability.
In fact, somewhere in your body, there may now be a mutated cell, ready to start infinite replication, wreaking havoc. But don't worry, under normal circumstances, the immune system will kill these rebellious cells immediately. However, the Dao was one foot high and the devil was one foot tall.
Certain toxins in heavy metals and benzene may destroy the immune system and make it helpless against cancer cells, so that cancer cells enter the second stage, they begin to copy unscrupulously, eventually forming cancerous tissue, then your body is sad.
Cancer risk: radiation, hormones, and genetic factors
It has been scientifically proven that radiation is indeed capable of causing mutations that lead to cancer. What is the reason behind that?
In the 1920s, Nobel laureate Herman Miller showed people experiments on X-rays in fruit flies. As a result, the fruit flies that produced the mutation multiplied. That is, in our body, radiation can destroy a cell's DNA, causing it to mutate, and eventually may form cancer cells.
In addition to radiation, our own hormones also increase cancer risk.
As we mentioned earlier, cancer cells will copy without listening to the command of growth signals. There is a very special case, that is, estrogen, which is a growth signal for both ordinary cells and cancer cells. For example, breast tissue, whether cancerous or not, will grow faster under the action of estrogen, and some tumors can even grow larger and larger under the influence of estrogen.
Finally, let's talk about another factor that can cause us cancer, and that's our innate genes.
That's why some cancers are familial, most notably the BRCA1 gene, also known as breast cancer gene 1, mutations that make entire family members more susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer. The normal BRCA1 gene helps repair damaged DNA in breast cells, and the mutated version loses this function, causing more and more damaged DNA in breast cells to accumulate into cancer cells.
About one in a hundred women has breast cancer gene 1, and the actress Angelina Jolie, whom we are familiar with, chose to have her breasts and ovaries removed because she was found to carry this gene, and Julie's mother also died of ovarian cancer.
Chemotherapy can inhibit the rapid growth of cancer cells
Although surgery is an important way to treat cancer, it has great limitations. For blood cancers such as leukemia, cancer cells can spread rapidly through the blood system, then surgical resection will not solve the problem. This kind of scalpel can't solve the cancer, need another method - chemotherapy.
The first mechanism of action of this chemotherapy is to destroy the DNA involved in cell replication. By destroying these genes, all affected cells stop growing, especially those with cancer, which are the most ferocious and unable to repair their DNA. That is, chemotherapy affects all cells in the body, but after chemotherapy, normal cells will regenerate, and cancer cells will die.
One of the substances used in chemotherapy, as you might not imagine, is derived from a chemical weapon from the First World War called mustard gas. Now, people use the derivatives of mustard gas to make nitrogen mustard, which can reduce cancer cells in the lymph nodes, bone marrow and blood, so it is used to treat leukemia and lymphoma.
Another type of chemotherapy targets the metabolic processes of cancer cells, drugs called antimetabolites, which can disguise themselves as nutrients needed by cells and disrupt the metabolic processes of cells. They are like incompetent employees who just take money and don't work.
For example, folic acid, a key substance in the process of cell replication, has a class of drugs that look very similar to it called antifolate, but this drug does not have the function of folic acid. If a cancer cell accidentally ingests an antifolate, it won't replicate DNA, causing the cancer cell to stop replicating and growing. In fact, these antifolates were the first drugs to successfully treat leukemia.
Of course, all this is said, but it is only a few of the many chemotherapy drugs. But keep in mind that all potent chemotherapy drugs have one thing in common, which is to stop the endless growth of cancer cells.
Surgery and chemotherapy are useless, and radiation therapy comes to help
We all know that radioactive substances can cause cancer. Later, it was found that radioactive material is actually a double-edged sword, and it can also be used to treat cancer, and the principle is also to destroy DNA.
How should we properly use this double-edged sword? First of all, we need to understand that the radiation used in radiation therapy is both precise and intense, and can remove a certain range of cancer cells.
For example, there is a common blood disease in children, called acute lymphoblastic leukemia, although chemotherapy has a certain effect on this disease, there are still some cancer cells that will remain in the brain, and once these cancer cells have spread to the entire brain, there is no way to remove them surgically.
Therefore, in this case, the best way is to do chemotherapy first, and then use radiation therapy to remove the remaining cancer cells in the patient's brain.
Doctors will irradiate the patient's head with high-energy rays, several times a week, for several weeks. Although the treatment process itself is not painful, it can cause adverse reactions such as vomiting, fatigue and hair loss. However, radiation therapy can greatly reduce the possibility of cancer recurrence.
In addition, radiation therapy is also effective for local tumors that cannot be removed surgically, after all, it can go deep into the places that the scalpel cannot reach, and it does not threaten the patient's life. For example, tumors that grow in key parts of the brain can also be operated on, but the damage caused by chemotherapy is certainly smaller. So you see, is radioactive material useful?
For those tumors that are not done by other methods, radiation therapy is indeed a very important cancer treatment. But it is not so much the last killer as it is a good partner for surgical treatment, which can reduce the complexity of the operation and improve the survival rate of patients.
Edited | Liangshan
Typography | Liangshan
Reading on the road: PhDs from world-famous universities read a good book in 30 minutes.