The Health Blog

I’ll explain here what the lymph system is, because it is important in understanding cancer. When you get a sore throat you may get swollen, painful lumps in your neck. These are lymph nodes (also called lymph glands). Normally they are smaller than a pea and quite soft. There is a network of these nodes throughout your body, and they are all connected to each other by very fine channels (or vessels). Eventually, all these channels join into one which empties its contents into the bloodstream at a point just behind the inner end of your left collarbone.

The job of the lymph system is to drain all excess fluid from your tissues and to filter out any unwanted material. So, with your sore throat, the germs go through the lymph channels to the nearest lymph nodes in your neck. There they are filtered out and white blood cells get to work on them and destroy them. In the process the node gets bigger, harder and painful.

In the same way, lymph nodes will filter out and trap cancer cells which come to them through the lymph channels. The nodes actually form part of your immune system and so have cells in them which ‘recognise’ the cancer cells as dangerous. If only a few cells come through, they can be completely destroyed. If there are too many for the node to handle, they survive, and grow to form a hard, but usually painless, lump. This is a type of secondary growth and it, in turn, can release cancer cells to travel either through more lymph channels or the blood to other parts of the body.

*36/40/1*

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