General Information
Cancer is the uncontrollable reproduction of cells that shouldn't reproduce. These cells get in the way of organs, sometimes destroying tissue.(1)
Risk Factors of cancer do not guarantee that you will have cancer, but increase your chances of having it. Among the long list, a few risk factors are growing older, smoking, exposure to sunlight, having a poor diet and a lack of exercise and having family history of cancer. Among this list, those items that you can control, like smoking, are considered life-style choices. Lifestyle choices that lead to cancer should be avoided, even if they don’t lead to cancer, because in themselves they are often bad choices.(3)
Risk Factors of cancer do not guarantee that you will have cancer, but increase your chances of having it. Among the long list, a few risk factors are growing older, smoking, exposure to sunlight, having a poor diet and a lack of exercise and having family history of cancer. Among this list, those items that you can control, like smoking, are considered life-style choices. Lifestyle choices that lead to cancer should be avoided, even if they don’t lead to cancer, because in themselves they are often bad choices.(3)
Staging and Prognosis: There are many different stages of each type of cancer that describe the severity of the cancer. For example, the earlier stag3es of any type of cancer are when the tumor has just started to grow. In the later stages, the tumor is spreading and invading other organs. The staging helps the doctors come up with a prognosis, which is their prediction on how the illness will turn out as far as survival or permanent damage. The prognosis is also tailored to the type of cancer you have. As different cancers have different stages, they have different levels of severity, and therefore different prognosis’s. For example in skin cancer, or melanoma, there are five stages. Stage 0, the cancer only involves the outer layer of skin, and its prognosis for 5 year survival is 100%. At stage IV, when the cancer has spread to other parts of the body, the prognosis is 19%. Lung cancer is different. At stage 1, when the tumor is small, the prognosis is 60-80%. At stage IV, though, the prognosis is less than 5%.(3)
