Long; but good article about why/how cancer recurs
[snips]
...Cancer’s “relapse” thus implies a belief that the disease was once truly dead.
But what if my patient’s cancer had never actually died, despite its invisibility on all scans and tests? CT scans, after all, lack the resolution to detect a single remnant cell. Blood tests for cancer also have a resolution limit: they detect cancer only when millions of tumor cells are present in the body. What if her cancer had persisted in a dormant state during her remissions — effectively frozen but ready to germinate? Could her case history be viewed through an inverted lens: not as a series of remissions punctuated by the occasional relapse, but rather a prolonged relapse, relieved by an occasional remission?
In fact, this view of cancer — as tenaciously persistent and able to regenerate after apparently disappearing — has come to occupy the very center of cancer biology. Intriguingly, for some cancers, this regenerative power appears to be driven by a specific cell type lurking within the cancer that is capable of dormancy, growth and infinite regeneration — a cancer “stem cell.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/magazine/31Cancer-t.html?_r=2&partner=MYWAY&ei=5065
[snips]
...Cancer’s “relapse” thus implies a belief that the disease was once truly dead.
But what if my patient’s cancer had never actually died, despite its invisibility on all scans and tests? CT scans, after all, lack the resolution to detect a single remnant cell. Blood tests for cancer also have a resolution limit: they detect cancer only when millions of tumor cells are present in the body. What if her cancer had persisted in a dormant state during her remissions — effectively frozen but ready to germinate? Could her case history be viewed through an inverted lens: not as a series of remissions punctuated by the occasional relapse, but rather a prolonged relapse, relieved by an occasional remission?
In fact, this view of cancer — as tenaciously persistent and able to regenerate after apparently disappearing — has come to occupy the very center of cancer biology. Intriguingly, for some cancers, this regenerative power appears to be driven by a specific cell type lurking within the cancer that is capable of dormancy, growth and infinite regeneration — a cancer “stem cell.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/magazine/31Cancer-t.html?_r=2&partner=MYWAY&ei=5065
