(noun/meh-TAS-tuh-sis)
by Hannah Thrash
What does it mean?
Cancer is the uncontrolled proliferation of cells that forms a tumor in one location. Metastasis is what happens when a tumor spreads from a primary location to a secondary location. For more information on what a tumor or cancer is you can check out our previous glossary post here. Metastatic cancer is usually much harder to treat than a primary tumor as the cells that survive the metastatic process usually have different genetic or metabolic makeup than the primary tumor cells.
There are multiple steps to metastasis.
- Invasion – cancer cells moving from the primary location into surrounding areas
- Intravasation – cancer cells pushing through the blood vessel wall into the bloodstream
- Circulation – cancer cells traveling through the bloodstream
- Extravasation – cancer cells moving out from blood vessels
- Seeding and Colonization – cancer cells finding a new home in a target tissue and creating a new tumor in a different location than in #1.
Figure 1: Lots of things happen during metastasis! Cancer cells leave their primary site, invade into surrounding areas, enter the bloodstream to travel to a new site, exit the bloodstream and then form a new tumor. Cells that survive the metastatic process look different than the original cancer cells and this makes the new tumor more difficult to treat. (Created in https://BioRender.com by the author.)
How do I use it in a sentence?
Metastasis of breast cancer into the brain or bone has fewer effective treatment options than primary breast cancer.
Etymology
Metastasis comes from the Greek word methistanai which means displacement or to change. Meta comes from a Greek word meaning next, while stasis means placement, so very literally the word means “next placement.”
History of Usage
The term metastasis was coined by Joseph Claude Anthelme Recamier, a French gynecologist, in 1829 in his work Research on Treatment of Cancer. However, the first physician to suggest that a metastatic process existed was Ibn Sina (980-1037) in his book The Canon of Medicine. (Check out further reading about these men here and here!)
Related Terms
Cancer, Malignant, Tumor, Disease, Oncogenesis, Malignant transformation
Fields of study in which this word is commonly used
Cancer Biology, Oncology, Cancer Genetics, Pathology
