Cancer :: essays research papers fc

Cancer INTRODUCTION   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In the American society, cancer is the disease most feared by the majority of people within the U.S. Cancer has been known and described throughout history.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In the early 1990s nearly 6 million cancer cases and more than 4 million deaths have been reported worldwide, every year. The most fatal cancer in the world is lung cancer, which has grown drastically since the spread of cigarette smoking in growing countries. Stomach cancer is the second leading form of cancer in men, after lung cancer. Another on the increase, for women, is breast cancer, particularly in China and Japan. The fourth on the list is colon and rectum cancer, which occurs mostly in older people.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In the United States more than one-fifth of the deaths in the early '90s was caused by cancer, only the cardiovascular diseases accounted at a higher percentage. In 1993 the American Cancer Society predicted that about 33% of Americans will eventually get cancer. In the United States skin cancer is the most dominating in both men and women, followed by prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women. Yet lung cancer causes the most deaths in men and women. Leukemia, or cancer of the blood, is the most common type in children. An increasing incidence has been clearly observable over the past few decades, due in part to improved cancer screening programs, and also to the increasing number of older persons in the population, and also to the large number of tabacco smokers--particularly in women. Some researchers have estimated that if Americans stopped smoking, lung cancer deaths could virtually be eliminated within 20 years.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The U.S. government and private organizations spent about $1.2 billion annual for cancer research. With the development of new drugs and treatments, the number of deaths among cancer patients under 30 years of age is decreasing, even though the number of deaths from cancer is growing overall. TYPES OF CANCER   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  1.Cancer is the common term used to designate the mosst aggressive and usually fatal forms of a larger class of the diseases known as neoplasms. A neoplasm is described as being relatively autonomous because it does not fully obey the biological mechanisms that govern the growth and the metabolism of individual cells and the overall cell interactions of the living organism. Some neoplasms grow more rapidly than the tissues from which they arise, others grow at a normal pace but because of the other factors eventually become recognizable as an abnormal growth and not normal tissue. The changes seen in neoplasm are heritable in that these characteristics are passed on from each cell to ots