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Basic Cancer Knowledge
First cancer were found in Egyptian and pre columbian mumies about 5,000 to 2,400 years ago. They were documented in ancient medical writing, written in papyrus 3,500 years ago. Nowadays, the reason behind cancer still not clearly understood. Scientist believe that cancer is the cell which grow rapidly than normal, assume abnormal shapes and sizes.
Cancer Worldwide Affects! And The Natural Treatments
There was a movie in the 1990's called 'The Medicine Man', where a scientist discovers the cure for cancer; whilst it still continues to kill people, it is not always the death sentence it once was. Think about that for a moment; can you even imagine the impact this would have on our world if the suffering of so many people could be put to an end?
Can Cancer Be Prevented And Cured?
While the answer to the question regarding the cure for cancer remains not guaranteed even by the experts, there are still ways that this second deadliest disease can be prevented. After all, prevention is supposed to be better than the cure, right?
Smoking is the most potent known cause of lung cancer. The question is: Why do some longtime smokers come down with the deadly disease whereas others escape it? New research points to a genetic culprit that also was fingered as upping a person's likelihood of becoming hooked on cigarettes.
Two new studies link a variation in a gene residing on chromosome 15 (of a person's 23 pairs of chromosomes) to a heightened risk of developing lung cancer; a third study suggests that the same mutation affects a person's tendency to become addicted to smokes and, by extension, develop the dreaded disease. Lung cancer is diagnosed in some 200,000 Americans and kills more than 150,000 each year.
The new research—published in both Nature and Nature Genetics—suggests that people with this genetic flaw have a 30 percent greater chance of developing the often-fatal illness. But the studies differ on the potential added risk of addiction. The findings offer insight into how this particular genetic variation and smoking interact to cause lung cancer. They provide "new targets for starting to think about how to treat drug addiction and, also, of course, for the prevention or treatment of lung cancer," says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in Bethesda, Md., who was not involved in the study.
The research teams scanned a catalog of 300,000 minute changes in the genome in which a base (unit of genetic material) was either deleted, duplicated or substituted. (Such alterations are known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs.) In one study, scientists from Iceland-based biotechnology company deCODE genetics tried to correlate these genetic variants with a person's smoking habits; the other research efforts attempted to tie them to lung cancer.
The deCODE group surveyed 50,000 Icelandic smokers about their habits; using information gleaned from that survey as well as from genomic scans of 40,000 admitted smokers in the bunch, the researchers zeroed in on a variant of the gene CHRNA, which codes for a receptor on nerve cells that can be stimulated by nicotine. The altered version of the gene was more common in the heaviest smokers than it was in the rest of the population. "Nonsmokers have a higher frequency of this variant than smokers that smoke between one to 10 cigs per day," notes neurologist Kári Stefánsson, deCODE's CEO, "because if you smoke and you have this variant, you tend to smoke more than 10 cigs per day."
When Stefánsson's team applied the stats to the incidence of lung cancer, it found that individuals with two copies of the altered gene had a whopping 70 percent greater chance of developing lung cancer; those with one copy had a 30 percent higher risk.
These findings are virtually identical to those of the other studies—one (in Nature) conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France (which was based on examinations of some 11,000 volunteers, 7,500 of whom were smokers) and the other (in Nature Genetics) by a team at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, which examined 9,000 individuals, some 4,000 of whom were smokers.
Paul Brennan, who led the IARC study, says he initially believed that the risk of getting lung cancer was elevated by the genetic predisposition to become addicted. "The genes made you more likely to smoke, made you likely to smoke more, made you less likely to give up, and therefore more likely to develop lung cancer," he says. But his research showed that, in fact, the gene appeared to independently increase a person's risk of developing the disease—with no link to addiction.
NIDA's Volkow suggests that the gene variant may lead certain individuals to smoke more due to its effect on the brain's reward centers (associated with addictive behavior) and may increase the risk of cancer, too, because it also plays a role in lung tissue function. Epidemiologist Christopher Amos, who led the Texas study, notes that the same nicotine receptor implicated in this study was shown in previous research to prompt tumor growth in other areas of the body, most notably the thymus (an organ located near the lungs that produces immune cells). "Nicotine or its derivatives can stimulate cells to proliferate, participate in new blood vessel development, and also not undergo cell death," he says, which are all characteristics of tumor formation and growth. "So that raises the possibility that there's a direct effect through nicotine in activating cells to go on to become cancerous."
Brennan says more research is needed before the findings can be put into play.
"There's not a public health message here that you can find out what version of the gene you have and decide whether to keep on smoking or not," he says. "You have to bear in mind that there are so many other disease[s] that are caused by smoking."
When you breathe in, air passes from your nose or mouth through the windpipe (trachea), which divides into two tubes (airways), one going to each lung. These are known as the right and left bronchus and they divide to form smaller tubes called bronchioles, which carry air through the lungs. At the end of the bronchioles are millions of tiny air sacs called alveoli. In the alveoli, oxygen is absorbed from air breathed in and passes into the bloodstream to be circulated around the body.
Lung cancer is one of the most common types of cancer. The lungs are a pair of cone-shaped organs situated inside the chest, they bring oxygen into the body and take out waste carbon dioxide. There is a strong link between smoking and lung cancer. There are two main categories of lung cancer; Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC) , and Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC). World-wide over 1 million people are diagnosed with lung cancer each year.
Sometimes the instructions to a cell go haywire and that cell and its offspring reproduce wildly, without regard for the shape and function of a lung. That wild reproduction can form tumors that clog up the lung and make it stop functioning as it should. Because of the large size of the lungs, cancer may grow for many years, undetected, without causing suspicion. Lung cancer can spread outside the lungs without causing any symptoms.Adding to the confusion, the most common symptom of lung cancer, a persistent cough, can often be mistaken for a cold or bronchitis.
The main types of lung cancer are small cell lung carcinoma and non-small cell lung carcinoma. This distinction is important because the treatment varies; non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) is sometimes treated with surgery, while small cell lung carcinoma (SCLC) usually responds better to chemotherapy and radiation.The most common cause of lung cancer is long term exposure to tobacco smoke. The occurrence of lung cancer in non-smokers, who account for fewer than 10% of cases, appears to be due to a combination of genetic factors, radon gas, asbestos, and air pollution, including second-hand smoke.
Lung cancer is one of the most common cancers in the world. It is a leading cause of cancer death in men and women in the United States. Cigarette smoking causes most lung cancers. The more cigarettes you smoke per day and the earlier you started smoking, the greater your risk of lung cancer. High levels of pollution, radiation and asbestos exposure may also increase risk.
Cancer of the lung, like all cancers, results from an abnormality in the body's basic unit of life, the cell. Normally, the body maintains a system of checks and balances on cell growth so that cells divide to produce new cells only when needed. Disruption of this system of checks and balances on cell growth results in an uncontrolled division and proliferation of cells that eventually forms a mass known as a tumor.
Yet most lung cancer deaths could be prevented. That's because smoking accounts for nearly 90 percent of lung cancer cases. Your risk of lung cancer increases with the length of time and number of cigarettes you smoke. If you quit smoking, even after smoking for many years, you can significantly reduce your chances of developing lung cancer. Protecting yourself from other risk factors for lung cancer, such as exposure to asbestos, radon and secondhand smoke, also decreases your risk.
