• Question: What sort of desease gives you cancer

    Asked by lucaloveschicken23 to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 20 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by hellotherehowreyou.
    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Interestingly, about 20 – 25% of cancers have some sort of viral involvement, notably cervical cancer (HPV), liver cancer (HBV, HCV), some lymphomas (EBV) and so forth. But the majority are caused by genetic breakdowns and mutations in the normal cell.

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Cancer is not usually caused by another disease, but there are exceptions to this. For example, the human papillomavirus causes around 70% of cases of cervical cancer, although it can now be prevented with a vaccine.

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Ooh…quite a few actually. Like Peter and Katy said, some viral infections can give you cancer. But other diseases – ones that aren’t caused by viruses – can cause cancer too! For example if you’ve got inflammation in your gut (inflammatory bowel syndrome) that persists for a long time, you can get cancer in your intestines, which is colorectal cancer. If you drink lots of alcohol, and damage your liver (cirrhosis), you can get liver cancer. Some scientists believe that having diabetes (high sugar in your blood) can cause kidney cancer, although we still need to do more research to know that for sure.

      What all these diseases have in common is that they damage your cells, over a long period of time. It’s not just diseases that can do that – chemicals, like cigarette smoke, or strong sunlight can do that to, if you expose your cells to them for long enough. If your cells are getting damaged faster than they can repair themselves, sometimes they have to leave some of the damage unrepaired – which means the damage gets passed on to new cells too! Sooner or later the damage in the cell’s DNA makes it go out of control and grow into a tumour, so you have cancer.

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      Cancer is often called a disease, but you can’t catch it!

      It can be caused by many things- certain chemicals, radiation etc.- but about 18 out of every 100 cases are caused by other diseases- mainly viruses, but also bacteria (stomach) and parasites (bladder).

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