Rita Trewartha
Rita Trewartha is head of clinical services and care quality commission registered manager at Bupa. She has been a registered nurse for 40 years during which time she has led and ...
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Who are you?
Hi, I am Rita Trewartha and I'm head of clinical services for Bupa UK Insurance. I'm a nurse with over 40 years experience, come and ask me about cancer.
What is cancer?
Cancer is essentially a group of abnormal cells. So it starts in the cells in our bodies. I try to explain it that the cells are like tiny little building blocks that make up our organs and tissues throughout our bodies and for them to grow and divide they get signals to do that. And those signals also tell them when to stop growing and dividing and to die because they're no use anymore. But sometimes also those signals can go wrong and the cell becomes abnormal. And those abnormal cells may also keep dividing and dividing more and developing into essentially forming a lump. Now, often you'll hear lumps referred to as tumours. Now tumours aren't necessarily cancers, not all lumps, not all tumours are cancers. The way that we find out the difference is by taking a biopsy or a small sample of cells from that lump or that tumour to determine what it's made up of, essentially. So the tumour or the lump might not be cancer, and that would be called a benign tumour. It can still grow, but it doesn't spread anywhere else in the body and it only causes problems and needs treatment if it's pressing on a structure or something nearby, a muscle or an organ. If it's not doing that, it will live there quite happily and not cause any harm whatsoever. A tumour that is cancer is called a malignant tumour, and that can grow into nearby tissues, and that is called a primary cancer site. But also what it can do is travel to other parts of the body, and it can do that through the blood or the lymphatic system in the body. And if it does that, then it can settle deposits elsewhere in the body, which can form other lumps or tumours that can grow. And that's called a metastatic cancer. So a secondary cancer to the primary site, but all part of the same cancer really. I suppose the other thing to also mention is that cancer can form in the blood cells or the bone marrow, and that develops into what we call as a group blood cancers. So one of those that you might have heard of quite frequently is leukaemia. So in essence, actually cancer is a group of abnormal cells.
How common is cancer?
So one in two of us will be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetimes with the highest lifetime risk for females being for breast, lung, and bowel cancer and for males being prostate, lung, and bowel cancer. And we have seen an increase over recent years in cases that are being identified, but that's because we are much more aware now of the risks and we are being screened more regularly through our national programmes. So we are catching cancers much earlier. For the 10 most common cancer types, more than 70% with of those cases in the UK have been attributable to known risk factors, and that includes lung and melanoma, skin cancer, which are 2 of the 5 most common cancer types in the UK.