In addition, asbestos can cause breast cancer?
Medifast health natural alternative healing treatment
|
Apr
28
how long does it take for a breast tumor to form?In addition, asbestos can cause breast cancer? 2 Responses to “how long does it take for a breast tumor to form?”Pings responses to this postLeave a Reply |
There are different types of breast cancer and some types are more aggresive than others. Tumors are assigned a grade – Grade 1-3 that represents how fast the cancer cells are growing.
Asbestos is known to cause certain types of lung cancer but is not linked to breast cancer.
We think it may take many years for a breast cancer cell to divide enough to grow into a tumor mass large enough to be detected – maybe 5, 10, or more years. It is not uncommon for a woman to have a primary breast cancer treated effectively and then develop a metastatic lesion 20 years later. That means there must have been breast cancer cells present in the metastatic site (bone, lung, brain, etc.) for all of those years, but it had taken 20 years for a tumor mass to grow large enough to cause symptoms and be detected with imaging studies.
You have to remember that one billion cancer cells in only the size of a marble – about 1 cm in diameter. A single aberrant cancer cell must go through 30 cell divisions to get to one billion cells. Once the cancer has divided 40 times and reached one trillion cells, it is usually extensive enough to end the life of the person. So three quarters of the cellular divisions occur “under the radar” without symptoms and without a size large enough to show up on any imaging study.