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Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. [3] [4] Cancer can be difficult to diagnose because its signs and symptoms are often nonspecific, meaning they may be general phenomena that do not point directly to a specific disease process. [5]
A person may be underweight due to genetics, [7] [8] poor absorption of nutrients, increased metabolic rate or energy expenditure, lack of food (frequently due to poverty), low appetite, drugs that affect appetite, illness (physical or mental) or the eating disorder anorexia nervosa.
In people with cancer, cachexia is diagnosed from unintended weight loss of more than 5%. For cancer patients with a body mass index of less than 20 kg/m 2, cachexia is diagnosed after the unintended weight loss of more than 2%. [12] Additionally, it can be diagnosed through sarcopenia, or loss of skeletal muscle mass. [12]
Perhaps most concerning: The age of the average cancer patient is decreasing. In 1995, 61% of cancer diagnoses were among those ages 65 and older. But by 2020, that proportion had dropped to 58%.
This notion is particularly strong in breast cancer culture. [240] One idea about why people with cancer are blamed or stigmatized, called the just-world fallacy, is that blaming cancer on the patient's actions or attitudes allows the blamers to regain a sense of control. This is based upon the blamers' belief that the world is fundamentally ...
The most common cancer among women in the United States is breast cancer (123.7 per 100,000), followed by lung cancer (51.5 per 100,000) and colorectal cancer (33.6 per 100,000), but lung cancer surpasses breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer death among women. [13]
Oncogenomics is a sub-field of genomics that characterizes cancer-associated genes.It focuses on genomic, epigenomic and transcript alterations in cancer. Cancer is a genetic disease caused by accumulation of DNA mutations and epigenetic alterations leading to unrestrained cell proliferation and neoplasm formation.