Childhood Cancer Awareness Month
1st December – 31st December 2011
The term ‘childhood cancer’, that is, cancer diagnosed before the age of 15, includes a wide range of illnesses that are generally unlike adult cancers.
See the activity that CLIC Sargent, the UK’s largest cancer charity for children & young people, has planned for this year’s Childhood Cancer Awareness Month on their website: www.clicsargent.org.uk/Getinvolved/ChildhoodCancerAwarenessMonth.
How common children’s cancers are
Childhood cancer is much less common than adult cancer. In fact it is quite rare. In the UK around 1,700 children (under 15) are diagnosed with a childhood cancer each year. This is a small number compared with almost 295,000 adults diagnosed with cancer in 2006. Leukaemia is the most common type of cancer found in children but it is still rare. Children develop different types of cancers than adults but they are often treated with the same types of treatments
Primary and secondary cancer
The main reason cancer can be difficult to cure is that it can spread to a different part of the body from where it started. The cancer that grows where it first started in the body is called the ‘primary cancer’. The place a cancer spreads to and then starts’ growing is called the ‘secondary cancer’ or ‘metastasis’.
How a cancer spreads
In order to spread, some cells from the primary cancer must break away, travel to another part of the body and start growing there. Cancer cells do not stick together as well as normal cells. They also may produce substances that stimulate them to move. But how do cancer cells travel through the body?
There are three main ways a cancer spreads:
- Local spread - The cancer grows directly into nearby body tissues
- Through the blood circulation - in order to spread, the cancer cell must first become detached. When it is in the bloodstream, it is swept along by the circulating blood until it gets stuck somewhere, usually in a very small blood vessel called a capillary.
Then it must slip through the wall of the capillary and into the tissue of the organ close by. There it must start to multiply to grow a new tumour. - Through the lymphatic system - the way a cancer spreads through the lymphatic system is very similar to the way it spreads through the bloodstream. The cancer cell must become detached from the primary tumour. Then it travels in the circulating lymph fluid until it gets stuck in the small channels inside a lymph node. There it begins to grow into a secondary cancer.