zulumoose wrote:I don't understand.
How can a cancer be present for 10 years before becoming dangerous? Isn't it the rapid growth of cancer cells that make them dangerous in the first place? So the first 10 years of rapid unchecked growth isn't dangerous and can go undetected?
Does not compute. What am I missing? The whole article cannot be read without subscription.
Googling cancer on Wikipedia
here, it appears that cancers often happen as a result of a series of mutations in the affected cells and their descendants, they can start slowly and become more invasive as the mutations accumulate. The more actively multiplying cells are, by definition, more likely to have descendants which then acquire even more mutations for uncontrolled growth. It's natural selection in action, undoing over months or years the mechanisms which evolved over millions of years to prevent the runaway multiplication of body cells. I suppose the hope is to catch them very early. Quoting from the Wikipedia article:
The errors that cause cancer are self-amplifying and compounding, for example:
A mutation in the error-correcting machinery of a cell might cause that cell and its children to accumulate errors more rapidly.
A further mutation in an oncogene might cause the cell to reproduce more rapidly and more frequently than its normal counterparts.
A further mutation may cause loss of a tumor suppressor gene, disrupting the apoptosis signaling pathway and immortalizing the cell.
A further mutation in the signaling machinery of the cell might send error-causing signals to nearby cells.
The transformation of a normal cell into cancer is akin to a chain reaction caused by initial errors, which compound into more severe errors, each progressively allowing the cell to escape more controls that limit normal tissue growth. This rebellion-like scenario is an undesirable survival of the fittest, where the driving forces of evolution work against the body's design and enforcement of order. Once cancer has begun to develop, this ongoing process, termed clonal evolution, drives progression towards more invasive stages.[70] Clonal evolution leads to intra-tumour heterogeneity (cancer cells with heterogeneous mutations) that complicates designing effective treatment strategies.
There is another article
here, which is not behind a paywall, about the news in the OP,