Cancer
Uncontrolled growth and spread of the abnormal cells within the body is referred to as cancer. The causatives are both the internal factors and the external factors. External factors include exposure to radiations and certain chemicals, infectious organisms and tobacco, while the internal factors include mutations occurring from metabolism, inherited immune conditions, and inherited hormones and mutations.
There are many types of cancer. The National Cancer Institute of the U.S. National Institutes of Health has listed thirteen types of cancer as the most common, among them breast, bladder, skin, lung, leukemia, kidney, pancreatic, prostate, melanoma, non-Hodqkin Lymphoma, endometrial and colon and rectal cancer. This listing has relied on the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Incidence statistics, with a requirement that the annual incidence for 2009 had to exceed 35,000 cases or more. On the top of the list as the most common was nonmelanoma which had more than 1 million new cases expected in 2009 and whose cases form about a half of all cancer cases.
Cancer facts and deaths
According to the American Cancer Society, cancer is the second most common killer disease in the United States from the heart disease. Cancer was expected to cause more than 1500 deaths a day this year and an annual death of about 562,340 Americans. One out of every four deaths is caused by cancer.
Following improvements in treatments and progress in diagnosing certain cancers at an earlier stage, the survival rate for all cancers shot up to 66% in the period 1996-2004 from 50% in 1975-1977. Although a five-year relative survival for cancer (which is a comparison of survival among patients diagnosed with cancer and those diagnosed without cancer in a range of five years, and considers people of the same sex and race and age) can be used to track or monitor progress in early detection and treatment of cancer, it does not contain provision for distinguishing those who have been cured and those who have relapsed or are still in treatment. In addition, it fails to some extent because it does not give the proportion of those who are cured permanently since death may occur beyond 5 years of diagnosis (: 2). The staging – which implies the spreading of cancer during therapy – is necessary in determining the choice of therapy and in assessing prognosis. The aforementioned staging depends on the primary size of tumor and whether it has spread to the rest of the body. There are different staging systems that can be applied to classify tumors. The TNM system represents three levels of tumor development: T-the primary tumor, N-the absence or presence of the regional lymph node involvement and M-when metastases are present or absent. Four stages I-IV (early to advanced disease stage) are then identified once T, N, and M are determined.
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