Question: How do you get cancer

John Foster answered on 13 Mar 2014:

This is a very good question, and one that lots of researchers are still trying to explain. But we do know broadly how this can happen.

The normal cells that make up your organs grow and divide to keep the organ intact, as some new cells grow other cells die. If the DNA that codes how the cell acts becomes damaged, cells can gain the ability to grow very quickly. Often this cell has safe guards to make it die, this prevents it going on to divide into lots of other mutated cells and making a cancer. If these cells stop this process of cell death they can get lots more mutations. This means they can also become aggressive and move to other places in the body to grow there (this is called metastasis).

The damage that occurs to the DNA can be from things like cigarette smoke or UV from the suns rays. Sometimes, as with some forms of breast cancer you can inherit a mutated gene from your parents which makes the risk of getting cancer more likely.