How Does a Person Die From Cancer?

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Dr. David Cathcart from Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, Missouri and we are going to talk a little bit about the harmful effects of cancer and how it is that people actually die from cancer. In one of the earlier segments you may have seen that where I talked about how cancer divides and can spread to other parts of the body. Essentially what cancer does is it grows and it becomes the massive cells that grow uncontrollably and get larger and larger and take up more and more space so for example in the case of the brain where there is a fixed amount of space inside the skull as those cancer cells grow they start to put pressure on sensitive brain tissue and that can ultimately case death. Another way that this happens is that the cells can break off from this growing mass of tumor cells and move to other parts of the body and implant themselves in other vital organs. Again this causes new little seeds of growth and when the cells break off into other parts of the body and start to grow that is what we refer to as metastasis. Ultimately as these cancer cells grow because they require nutrition they tend to rob nutrition from other parts of the body that need it and so essentially we could die from malnutrition as another way we die from cancer so probably one of the most common ways of death from cancer is because either it is a space occupying lesion that presses on surrounding sensitive tissue or it robs other organs and robs our body of necessary nutrition. This is Dr. David Cathcart of the Heartland Regional Medical Center."