Cancer

What is Cancer :

The body is made up of millions of units. These individual units called cells, have a finite lifetime which are created by cell division in the body. These units or cells grow and divide in a normal fashion. After completing their life-cycle, the cells die. During the childhood years of a persons’s life the cells of the body grow faster and divide faster to create similar cells. As the person grows into adulthood, the process of division slows down and finally gets limited only to replace wear and tear at a later stage in the person’s life.

This whole process of cell division is guided by a pattern called DNA. The DNA is like a blueprint that is present in each and every cell of the body. This blueprint decides when the cell has to divide and when it needs to stop functioning.

Under normal circumstances, this process goes on very smoothly in an organized manner. But, due to certain conditions, that cause damage to the DNA sequence of a cell, may accelarate the whole process, and may create special type of cells, which are normally not found in the body.

These cells, divide at a much faster rate as compared to the normal body cells, and may migrate into other parts of the body to infect other cells, resulting in tremendous growth of cells in some part of the body, often resulting in a cellular mass called tumor.

This whole process of infection of healthy cells and formation of tumor is collectively summed up under the name of cancer.