Guest Author - Lisa Shea

Just what is metastatic cancer? Learn more about the basics of this disease.

The word "metastasize" means in essence to spread. Most cancers begin in one location - say the lung. However, cancers have the ability to travel throughout the body, to lodge in other locations. So for example, if you have lung cancer, then bits of that lung cancer might go through the blood stream and end up in the brain. You then have in essence lung cancer growing in the brain.

As you can imagine, this can make the cancer extremely hard to treat. You have the issue of figuring out where the cancer might have travelled to. You have the issue of figuring out how to treat the cancer in this new location.

Normally when you treat cancer, you treat it based on where it first grew. So there are treatments for "lung cancer". Even if that lung cancer moves into the brain, you still need to use "lung cancer" treatments to handle it.

You would refer to the initial cancer by its location name. So in our example, you would call it

Lung Cancer

When you refer to the locations that the lung cancer has traveled to - for example the brain - you would refer to that as

Metastatic Lung Cancer to the Brain