Surgical Oncology

Archive for the ‘Prostate Cancer’ Category

While the normal healthy cells within our body are destined to die after a predetermined number of cell divisions (senescence), cancer cells are, essentially, immortal. They divide endlessly, until enough cancer cells have formed to cause a tumor. Similarly the normal cells that line your colon (as well as all of the other estimated 75 trillion cells that make up the human body) never decide to leave the colon and spread to, say, your liver or your lungs. However, colon cancer cells seem to have an overwhelming compulsion to move into blood vessels and lymphatic vessels, and from there, to spread to other distant organs of the body. Once these nefarious pioneers arrive in the liver, the lungs, or in other organs outside of the colon, these metastatic tumor cells then resume their growth cycle, eventually causing metastatic tumors to form. Other types of cancer exhibit the same malignant biology, beginning with invasion through normal tissues, followed by invasion into blood vessels or lymphatic vessels, and ending with the establishment of metastatic colonies of tumors in distant organs and tissues.

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