A cure is the only word we want to hear in case a loved one has been diagnosed with cancer.
However, most doctors will not mention the word “cure” since cancer has no cure.
The main reason why cancer lacks a cure is insufficient knowledge about cancer mutation. Cancer cannot be cured since the cancerous cell remains in the body and later on, grows and divides to form a new tumor.
How to monitor cancer?
Although cancer research has been in progress for 200 years without a cure, doctors treat each cancer case differently. Doctors supervise the general health, type of cancer, and stage and preferences of the patient before administrating treatment.
Biomarker testing searches for proteins and genes which offer cancer information. With biomarker testing, the doctor monitors the spread of cancer within the body before determining the specific cancer treatment.
Why do some patients get diagnosed at later stages of cancer?
Cancer has a remission period whereby the cancer cells are under control for weeks, months, or years. Therefore, most patients are diagnosed in later stages.
Most cancer survivors enjoy a complete remission period whereby cancer cells are not tested. Nonetheless, some survivors experience partial remission whereby the cancer cells shrink but still the cancer cells are present and likely to regrow.
Types of cancer treatment
Some cancer treatments include; stem cell transplant, radiation, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, hormone, and hormone therapy, and palliative care.
Chemotherapy entails the use of drugs that fights cancer despite triggering hair loss among other side effects.
Hormone therapy suppresses the specific hormone that triggers the growth of cancer cells, especially in breast and prostate cancer.
Immunotherapy treatment allows the body to fight the disease by stimulating the T-cells that fight cancer.
Radiation therapy utilizes a high dose of radiation rays to shrink the tumor hence, damaging the DNA of the cancer cells.
Will we ever cure cancer?
We might be able to cure cancer through DNA sequencing since the process expounds on how genes get to control cancer. DNA sequencing enables doctors to establish the specific mutation causing cancer in the DNA of the patient, leading to target treatment on mutations.
DNA sequencing will help doctors develop genomic medicine since they understand the type of gene mutating in particular inherited cancer.
Patients diagnosed with colon cancer tend to have a larger amount of plasmid in the colon, causing chronic inflammation and mutations. Bacterial plasmids tend to slightly modify and replicate independently to cause gene mutation.
Therefore, plasmid genomes sequencing will help cure cancer since some infectious cancer agents originate from plasmids.
Gene sequencing will be the best cure for cancer since each cancer case is unique. We will also cure cancer by changing some behaviors such as smoking and air pollution, which triggers oxygen radicals.
