Explaining Kids About Cancer

Hi, my name is Dr. Marta Gabryelska. And today I would like to tell you about what is cancer and how it is formed. Every cell has a potential to become a cancer cell. How is it happening? Well, at the beginning the happy cell is just growing in your body. Then while acquiring some bad habits, it’s slowly changing. It’s changing what it does, it’s changing how it behaves and how it looks. And through these changes, in the end, it forms a cancer cell.

What is happening next? When there is one cancer cell present in the human body, it will divide. It will form more cancer cells that will grow together as a group. We call it a tumor. So the cells divide. And the amount of them is just growing and growing faster and faster, forming something which is dangerous for the body.

When the cancer occurs in human body, it is in certain place, but later with the time it can start spreading. Little cells can migrate with blood to different parts of the body. And they can settle there. We call this metastasis.

So what we scientists can do to fight cancer? There are a few strategies that we can use to do it. We can try to do early detection of cancer. If we can have a blood sample, a poo sample, or any other sample of the person’s body, we can check whether cancer cells are present there. And then it will be easier to detect the cancer and to prevent it because we can add drugs that will easily kill cancer cells. If this is too late for that, and we know that cancer is there, we can try to stop the growth of the cancer. We do it with special drugs that target cancer cells. We are still working on creating better drugs to kill cancer in a more efficient way. Third, we can try to stop the spread. We can try to stop the cells from metastasizing. And these cells we want to kill with special drugs as well.

I hope you liked this short talk and you will no longer be afraid of cancer. We are here to fight cancer. And if one day you want to become a scientist, we will really need your help.

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