Every day, super-tiny cells are waging wars inside of us.
These ferocious fighters are too small for us to see without a microscope, but they’re
capable of overtaking just about any organ in your body.
They’re cancer cells, and they’re actually constantly arising inside of us.
Most of the time, our immune system seeks them out and neutralizes them.
But it’s not always successful.
That’s because cancer is not simply one disease—it’s many.
Cancer cells can attack your brain, your liver, your lungs, and a lot of other super-important
parts of your body.
But what about your heart?
Heart cancer isn’t a thing you hear much about.
That’s because it -- almost -- doesn’t exist.
Most hospitals report fewer than one case of heart cancer per year.
So why are tumors on this organ so rare?
Well, those cancer cells we were just talking about get their power from their ability to
divide and multiply.
Cancerous cells become a problem when they start to divide uncontrollably and take over
everything.
When they’re behaving normally, cells know when to stop replicating based on instructions
encoded in their DNA.
Cancerous cells just don’t get the memo and keep replicating, and then replicating…
and then replicating some more.
But unlike cells in other organs, our heart cells do almost all of their dividing during
fetal development.
Sometimes—but not often—tumors can form in fetuses while these cells are still able
to divide.
Once we’re born, though, our heart cells stop dividing.
Tumors that might have grown while we were in utero tend to stop growing at this point.
That’s because our hearts are mostly made of muscle cells, which can grow in proportion
to our bodies, but they don’t multiply the same way that other cells in our bodies do.
See, every cell in your body has a chance of becoming abnormal if its DNA is damaged.
A few abnormal cells is OK, so long as they’re kept under control by our immune system.
The problem arises when these cells start to divide uncontrollably, and form lumps or
growths.
Some of these growths might be benign, but… sometimes they aren’t.
But since very little cell division happens in the heart, problem cells are much less
likely to turn into a cancerous growth.
So yes, you can get heart cancer.
But it’s extremely rare, and either begins elsewhere in the body and spreads to the heart
through the bloodstream, or it affects babies who got the disease in utero.
Which means: if you’re old enough to be watching this video, you probably have one
less thing to worry about.
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