UNDERSTANDING HOW THE BODY RESPOND TO CANCEROUS CELL

in #steemstem7 years ago (edited)

Good day everyone out there.I hope you are steeming.My write up today is going to be simple and understandable.I want to introduce to you an inspector on guard,a member of sentinel that guard our body against infections.I will be specific on how the body immune system fight cancer.Yes cancer.I know you have heard about it and how it is an integral part of causes of death.Dont tell me you don't know that cancer kill,infact it's one of the most painful cause of death ever known.As I want to discuss how body defence mechanism fight cancer cell,I will still discuss possible reason why cancerous cell may escape surveillance camera of the Immune system and spread to other part of the body with no resistance.Enjoy the ride.

I will start with the Genesis of cancer at the cellular level.Do you know that cell have instructors?,what we can call "controller".The cell instructors are the DNA. The DNA is found inside Gene and Gene is found inside Chromosome and Chromosome is inside Nucleus, which is the control center for all activities inside each cell.So,when the Gene which contains genetic code DNA, experience change,control over cell division and multiplication is lost and mutation occur.This change is attributed to Gene damage.Just picture a vehicle that recently accelerated to a maximum speed and had a break failure!!! -the vehicle had lost it control- disaster just happened!.When this happens,cell division has no control anymore.It just divide and multiply without control and eventually develop to cancer.I want you to know that cancer can also develop when Gene that are suppose to mop up old or damaged cell by instructing them to die are damaged.

Having been familiarized with Carcinogenesis, let's take a shot trip to how cancer spread from it site to neighbouring normal cell/tissue/organ.The tumor may be malignant or benign tumor.It is malignant when it spread to other normal cell or benign when it is localised.If the cancer spread, it's called Metastatic cancer.The cancerous cell had escaped the immune surveillance so it spread out.


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Let's now look at how the body deal with this life threatening disease.The body immune system is known to fight foreign agents.Part of this immune system is a special cell that specializes in recognizing cancer cell.These cells are called NATURAL KILLER CELLS.Yes,I mean that.The cells provide internal defence against tumor cells. They are able to perform this function because they have the natural ability to discriminate between self and other cells.They function with other cell to form what is called inhibitory receptor.The receptors gave the NATURAL KILLER CELLS special ability to stop activities of cancer cells.


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Amazingly,these NATURAL KILLER CELLS has a strange character to either activate self for cell defence when it does not recognise MHC 1 Molecule on the host cell or inhibit self by generating inhibitory signal when it recognises MHC 1 on the host cell.When this inhibitory signal is generated,alas!!! there will be tumor escape. A good escape from the NATURAL KILLER CELLS immune surveillance and activation.So when this happen,METASTATIC CANCER STAGE BEGIN.This means the cancer begin to spread to other parts or region of the body.

CONCLUSION
As am rounding up this post,we have already seen how human body can either fight cancer when NATURAL KILLER CELLS are activated, or human body may not be able to fight cancer when inhibitory signal is generated.Thank for reading this post.You can learn more about this topic by visiting the following address.

https://www.cancer.gov
https://www.intechopen.com/book/natural-killer-cell.
http://dxdoi.org//0.5772-intech-open.72328
https://www.cancerresearch.org
https://www.wikipedia.org
https://wwwncb.nih.gov

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Hi! I'm new on steemit. It's such a good post! I'm a pharmacist and I've a passione for science in general and for scientific articles..if you want follow me back!

You're welcome on board.Thisnis a good platform for all scientist @michelapalmisano

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