Antioxidants and Cancer -

Benign and Malignant Tumors

The word ‘tumour’ does not necessarily mean a cancer. There are two categories of tumours – benign and malignant – and the difference is important. Benign tumours are not cancers. They are just lumps of cells which, white still closely resembling the tissue from which they have arisen – muscle, nerve, fat , blood vessel and so on – have begun to multiply more rapidly than normal. They remain intact, form a capsule, and grow by expansion only Malignant tumours are quite different. They do not remain in a well-defined, circumscribed lump, insulated from surrounding tissue. Their nature is invasive, and they stretch out in columns which pass into nearby tissues, crossing body barriers spreading along surfaces, seeding off into blood and lymph vessels, and usually reproducing and growing at a much faster rate than normal cells.

A cancer starting with one small group of cells has to divide many times before reaching a mass large enough to be detected the smallest such detectable mass is of the order of 1 gram.Cancers are usually fatal when the tumour mass has reached 500 grams to 1 kg. This size is reached after only 10 further doublings of the 1 gram mass