How Does Cancer Work in the Body?

Video Transcript

"Hi I am Dr. Grace Wang, I am a medical oncologist working Advanced Medical Specialties in Miami, Florida. I am here on the behalf of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Let's talk about how cancer works in the body. Cancer cells can start in one part of the body, and they con grow uncontrolled by your body. And they may just form a local mass, and that can be removed and cured. But sometimes it spreads to the bloodstream or to the lymphatics, and to other parts of the body. So that we might require medication in order to shrink the tumor cells, or to keep them or delay them from ever coming back. We basically can do scans like PET scans or CAT scans in order to find out if they have spread to other parts of your body. Or otherwise we may know that it is a type of cancer that tends to be localized, and can just be cured by just removing it. Different types of cancers have different types of aggressiveness. We can look at it under the microscope, and some are very well differentiated, and may grow more slowly. And some may be very poorly differentiated, and may grow more quickly. So we may be able to tell the prognosis of a cancer based on the way it looks under the microscope. It also may have many other characteristics based on let's say for breast cancer, the estrogen receptor, the progesterin receptor, the HER-2 neu, the oncotype these are all different types of prognostic test that can be done on the tumor to assess aggressive it is."