July 3, 2018

Today I had my second day of internship at Samsung Medical Center. Today I learned about the types of diagnosis, metastasis, and immunotherapy.

Types of Diagnosis

	Tumor (present)	Tumor (not present)
Positive	True positive	False positive
Negative	False negative	True negative

True positive means that a doctor diagnosed that there is a tumor when there the tumor is actually present.
False positive means that a doctor diagnosed that there is a tumor when the tumor is not present.
False negative means that a doctor diagnosed that there is no tumor although tumor is present.
True negative means that a doctor diagnosed that there is no tumor when there is no tumor.

Metastasis

How cancer spreads throughout the body

Metastasis is a term for cancer which spreads to a different part of the body from its initial place. Other words such as “metastatic cancer,” “stage 4 cancer,” and “advanced cancer” also refer to metastasis. Metastasis develops when cancer cells break away from the primary tumor and enter the circulatory system. Once cancer cells enter the blood, it can form new tumors in many parts of the body. Any cancer can spread, or in other words, metastasize, based on the type of cancer, how fast the cancer is growing, and how long patients have cancer before treatment.

Lymph nodes in the body

It is most common that metastasis develops in the bones, liver, lymph nodes, lungs, and brain. Lymph nodes refer to major sites of white blood cells that act as filters for foreign particles and cancer cells. The image to the left shows swollen lymph nodes in the human body. Although, as mentioned previously, cancer can spread to many parts of the body, some of the cancers tend to spread to specific parts of the body. For example, breast cancer tends to spread to the bones, liver, lungs, chest wall, and brain, and lung cancer tends to spread to the brain, bones, liver, and adrenal glands.

When doctors diagnose metastasis, they must choose a treatment option based on primary cancer, how much cancer has spread, the patient’s age and health, and the patient’s personal treatment choices. Treatments for metastasis include treatment that affects the entire body, such as chemotherapy and hormone therapy and medication that affects only the area with cancer, which includes surgery and radiation therapy.

Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy is a treatment that affects your body’s immune system to help fight cancer (American Cancer Society). It is also a treatment that former U.S. president Jimmy Carter benefited from when doctors diagnosed that he has metastatic melanoma – a type of skin cancer. Immunotherapy stimulates the patient’s immune system to work harder to attack cancer cells or gives the patient immune system components such as proteins. Immunotherapy is crucial because sometimes, the immune system cannot target cancer cells because cancer starts to grow out of control. To overcome this, researchers have developed immunotherapy, which helps the immune system to recognize cancer cells so that it can destroy them.

There are several types of immunotherapy. Monoclonal antibodies are designed to attack a particular part of a cancer cell. Immune checkpoint inhibitors help the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells. Cancer vaccines are put into the body to start an immune response to cancer.