• Question: What is the difference between a tumour e.g brain tumour and cancer. is it that a tumour eats away the cells and a cancer grows more ?

    Asked by emmaandizzy to Gioia, Iain, Jo, Leo, Mariam on 16 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by hannahandkatiexxx.
    • Photo: Mariam Orme

      Mariam Orme answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      That’s a very good question, I think this is something that confuses a lot of people.

      A tumour is a lump of abnormal cells – cells that have started growing out of control. Some tumours are “benign”, which means they’re not harmful – they grow quite slowly and don’t invade other parts of the body. Other tumours, on the other hand, grow fast and do invade other parts of the body, so they’re very dangerous. We call these sorts of tumours “malignant”, or cancerous. So some tumours are harmless, while others are basically cancers.

      To make things even more complicated, you can have cancer without having a tumour – for example in leukaemia, you don’t have a lump of cancer cells, instead the cancer cells are floating around individually in your bloodstream.

      I hope that makes things a bit clearer!

    • Photo: Joanna Watson

      Joanna Watson answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      I think that the difference is that some tumours just grown in one place to make a lump – these are called benign tumours, whereas cancers have the potential to spread to other parts of the body too like to the liver or the lungs.

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