Explain how cancer treatments can occur at the cellular level?
amanda asked:
please help! its for my biology homework and i dont even understand what the question means much less the answer
thank you!
please help! its for my biology homework and i dont even understand what the question means much less the answer
thank you!
The most effective way to do this is to simply remove the cancer by cutting it out surgically. However, surgery doesn’t work unless the cancer is in a focused location like a tumor. For something like lymphoma, cancer cells are spread throughout the body, so you need to kill certain cells all over the body.
When surgery isn’t an option, either chemotherapy or radiation are used. The goal of these cancer treatments is to kill the cancer cells without killing the non-cancer cells, which isn’t easy to do. To be effective, you have to deliver radiation or toxic chemicals to all of the cancer cells, but they are mixed with normal cells, so both normal and cancer cells get hit with the cancer treatment, and both types of cells can be killed. Because of this, cancer patients sometimes die from the cancer treatment before they die from cancer.
Cellular biology is important because there are a few tricks that are used to focus the treatments on the cancer cells and minimize the killing of normal cells. The one distinguishing feature of cancer cells is their rapid growth - much faster than normal cells. So, most treatments are designed to affect only cells that are rapidly growing by disrupting cellular growth. If you remember all the stuff about mitosis - this is how all cells grow in number. If you can disrupt mitosis, you can stop cancer - radiation and most older chemotherapies work this way.
Killing all cells that are growing is not very focused, so many more cells beside cancer get killed. Consequently, cancer research is focused on finding unique enzymes or unique properties found in cancer tissues, so the only the cancer cells will be killed by blocking the enzymes or critical pathways used for cell metabolism.
Another way is by raising your levels of glutathione in your cells. Do your research on Glutathione and really impress your teacher. This is a subject that very few Doctors are very well read up on.
Glutathione is the bodies Master Antioxidant, Immune booster and detoxifier to each individual cell.
It’s job is to blast anything attempting to corrupt the cell with a molecule of hydrogen and destroy it. It’s the very reason why when you were a baby, you were 500% less likely to develop cancer because the cysteine from your mother’s milk kept your glutathione levels super elevated. Pretty cool huh?
You might want to expand on this:
CANCER: There’s a new Swedish study which shows that human breast milk kills cancer. On the news this guy who drank human breast milk (with a prescription) beat cancer. It was discovered by Swedish scientists that human breast milk (spilled into a petri dish) kills cancer. People who drink it have had some success in fighting off cancer.
You need a prescription and it’s about $3 an ounce at a breast milk bank, but it works.