Your body is a permanent construction site. When faults in its building blocks — the cells — are reproduced, tumors and cancer can result.
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00:00Your body is a construction site, your whole life long.
00:04Its building blocks, the cells, are in a constant process of renewal.
00:09Every day your body replaces 330 billion of them.
00:14Specialized stem cells ensure a fresh supply.
00:18Found in almost every organ in the body, they're capable of reproducing new cells as needed.
00:26Some need replacing on an almost daily basis.
00:29For example, the mucosa cells in the gut.
00:34Or the blood cells.
00:38Others live for months or even years.
00:42What these new cells should look like is written in the stem cell's DNA.
00:48But sometimes these assembly instructions get damaged.
00:54By UV light, air pollutants, toxins in food, inflammation, or viruses.
01:03Some changes in the DNA are congenital.
01:06And the older we get, the more likely errors are to occur.
01:11When cells are reproduced, the assembly instructions are simply copied, mistakes included.
01:18Producing faulty building blocks.
01:22Then, for example, the stem cells in bone marrow might only produce defective white blood cells.
01:30Skin cells could start multiplying uncontrollably.
01:34Or mucosa cells in the gut could trigger the formation of polyps or tumors.
01:41These cell masses can be benign.
01:45But tumors that are malignant keep on growing and in doing so destroy surrounding tissue.
01:53Cells that break away from the original tumor and form new tumors in other organs or tissues are called metastases.
02:03In the worst case scenario, they can cause a total breakdown.
02:09Still, your body isn't defenseless.
02:13The immune system conducts security checks to detect invaders and not just viruses or bacteria.
02:20It can weed out defective building blocks too.
02:25Still, cancer cells are crafty and have lots of tricks to avoid detection.
02:30These include disguising themselves as regular cells or suppressing the immune response.
02:40To combat malignant tumors, new early detection methods and cancer therapies are constantly being developed.
02:50Yet despite all the progress made, there's still much to be learned about the causes and development of cancer.
02:57And for those affected, the diagnosis often marks the start of a long battle to keep the body's construction site up and running.
03:10For more UN videos visit www.un.org