Question: What is cancer caused by?

Rosie Goodburn answered on 27 Apr 2021:

You can think of cancer as the bad behavior of your own body’s cells that happen when certain damage (mutations) builds up in your DNA. Sections of your DNA that make an instruction are called genes. You actually have some genes specifically meant to stop cancer from occurring by stopping the cells from growing out of control. However, you also have genes that can be switched on to tell your cells to keep growing. When either of these genes is damaged in certain ways, your body’s cells might ignore signals to stop growing and start behaving badly and growing out of control.
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The badly behaving cells can form a tumour, which can then continue to grow and mutate since many regulatory genes have been damaged or changed. If the tumour becomes malignant (meaning it’s likely to spread) it can cause damage to surrounding tissues and move around the body.
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So cancer is caused by mutations to DNA – but what causes that? Some common risk factors are smoking, drinking alcohol, and poor diet. These can introduce harmful substances (called carcinogens) into the body that can affect the genes in your cells. Another way to get cancer could be through the infection of certain viruses.
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Because cancer is your own body behaving badly, there are many many different types of cancer. Doctors decide a treatment plan for each patient based on their specific case. Sometimes it is enough to surgically remove cancer, but other times we need to use a combination of other treatments like radiation therapy, chemotherapy, or other drugs. The goal of cancer research is to understand cancers better and to improve our methods for curing them as well as finding new ways to cure cancers, like immune therapy where we can guide the body’s own immune cells to attack the cancer!