How Does Cancer Form in the Body?

Video Transcript

"This is Dr. David Cathcart, from Heartland Regional Medical Center, and today, we're going to talk about how cancer forms in the body. As you may have seen in one of the earlier segments, cancer is a abnormal growth of cells, and they rapidly grow and divide, and as they do, they tend to take up space, and press on sensitive or surrounding tissues, and they rob the body of those nutrients. Cancer cells are typically carried or metastasized, from one part of the body to another, by means of the lymph system. The lymph system is another network of tubes, much like our arteries and veins that carry blood, but lymph carries part of the fluid of the immune system, that's attached to lymph nodes, and typically, then cancer cells move through the body, through the process of metastasizing, through the lymph vessels, and then frequently, these lymph vessels have little stations if you will, of what is called lymph nodes, and so oftentimes, cancers will present as a swollen lymph node somewhere. There are of course, many other causes of swollen lymph nodes besides cancer, but that's certainly one, so cancer moves through the body, by means of these lymph channels, essentially highways to other parts of the body, and then it re-implants itself in another place, and that's how it forms cancer in other areas, or metastasis. This is Dr. David Cathcart, talking about cancer forming in the body."