Question: How is lung cancer made or formed

Alex Haragan answered on 2 Jun 2018:

Thats a great question!

Before I talk about lung cancer specifically, I’ll talk about cancer in general.

The simplest way to think about most cancer is that it comes from cells in your body that simply don’t stop dividing and growing. They don’t act like they normally should – they just keep dividing and making more and more cells which don’t do anything useful.

They steal blood, oxygen, nutrients and spread and invade into other normal tissues and stop them from working.

So why does this happen?

Well almost every normal cell needs to divide at some point to create new cells. This is a finely controlled process – there are many “start” commands and many “stop” commands. When one or both of these go wrong – the cells can get stuck dividing and become cancer.
This happens because of mutations in the cells’ DNA.

The mutations happens for lots of reasons – but in the case of lung cancer the single biggest cause (by a long way) is smoking.

Smoking isn’t the only cause though – air pollution, car fumes, burning some materials and many other things have all been linked with cancer. Some special types of lung cancer are caused because of exposure to materials used in buildings or factories (like asbestos or silicon) that we either don’t use now or use much more safety equipment than we used to.

Saying all that – often we don’t know the cause and this is one of the biggest challenges in researching lung cancer!