How does cancer spread so quickly and how do you prevent it from spreading further ?

Question: How does cancer spread so quickly and how do you prevent it from spreading further ?
- Keywords:
  cancer,
  treatment
Asked by drhofstadter to Leila on 13 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by lexi247.
- Leila Nichol answered on 13 Mar 2013:
  
  There are different kinds of tumours, some are very aggressive. It also depends on where the tumour is, if the grow close to blood vessels, lymph chains, bone, or marrow, the cancel can spread here and then follow the chain through your body.
  
  There are chemo drugs which stop spread by targeting the tumour uptake sites, and we can deliver doses of radiation to different tumour sites. With some types of tumour we deliver radiation to the whole body all at once.
  
  There’s no way of definitely predicting where/when/to what extent the tumour will spread but we look at different biological markers to try and help s with our decisions.
  
  Sometimes tumour cells have spread that you can see at the time, then materialise into a tumour a couple years later after the primary tumour has been treated.

Question: How does cancer spread so quickly and how do you prevent it from spreading further ?