Thread: cervical cancer?

The way labs differentiate pre-cancerous or cancerous from benign cells is through microscopic techniques however there is no simple exact visual way to detect cancer cells. What technicians do is look for irregularities in the cells that should otherwise look normal under the microscope. Normal cells have a very uniform shape and nuclear size in a repeating pattern while having a clean shape and good organization, a good example for most cells is a honeycomb shape. From there sampled biopsy of cells the technician can then grade the cells according to a tumor grading scale which takes into account the specific abnormalities seen on the microscope slide and can then determine if the cells are from an aggressive cancer, a slower one, one that is a possible pre-cancerous, or if they have metastasized.

In regards to irregular cells there is a multitude of things that the techs look for including:

- a larger nuclear size
- higher N/C ratio (nuclear to cytoplasmic volume)
- nuclear shape has gone pleomorphic (this means it looks odd)
- mitotic index is high (this means that cells divide more-a well known characteristic of cancer cells)
- tissue organization is completely disorganized (normally it would be in a nice repeating pattern much like the repetitive pattern of a honeycomb, but cancer cells look like you threw them at a wall making them appear like a splattered pile of goop)
- differentiation is anaplastic (this means that the cancer cells look nothing like what they arose from)
- no boundary within the cells (there is no real border where the cell clearly ends and the new one begins, the cancer cells literally look like they are reaching for new places to grow)

Cells are dividing and actually mutating extremely often so it is not uncommon to discover a few cells that do look a bit wonky and different leading a tech to say they appear abnormal. Many people experience this and are often told to go in for another test, which in a majority of cases results in a normal test because the body works to rid of the wonky weird ones.

The reason your cells may have been categorized as pre-cancerous was the tech may have made note that there was say 5 of the possible 7 different cancer markers as I described above. This would allow the tech to grade the abnormal cells which means they could be called pre-cancerous, maybe not full blown cancer but they sure look like they could be kind of thing. The higher the grade the more aggressive the cells are, and possibly the more aggressive the cancer. Removing cells once they are found to be abnormal is mainly done as a precautionary thing because like many know if you catch these cells early enough, especially before they metastasize, the treatment regime can be extremely effective. So technically pre-cancerous could be defined as cancerous if it is an extremely aggressive form like pancreatic cancer and therefore has a high grade score. However on the flip side if cells are caught early enough it could just be defined as an abnormal and therefore possible pre-cancerous due to a low grade score.