<p>after all, don’t cells in those regions reproduce as well?</p>
<p>Don’t quote me on this, but doesn’t cancer usually have to happen around some type of organ? ie kidney, liver, lung, brain, etc. I don’t believe there are any organs in your legs or arms, besides skin covering them.</p>
<p>well there’s skin, bone, bone marrow, muscle, cartilage, fat…you can have cancer in your leg and hand…but calling it leg and arm cancer wouldn’t be specific enough…there can be numerous cancers around different quadrants/limbs of your body…take the head/face for example…you can get skin cancer, gum/throat cancer(there’re specific cells within mouth and throat that get infected), neural cancer, etc…basically the nomenclature for cancer isn’t done by location of the cancer, but types of cells infected and particular cells may be found in different parts of your body…</p>
<p>Ok, so what would the cancer be called if it were affecting the fat/muscles of your hand? I don’t see any nomenclature related to those…</p>
<p>Cancer is named by the type of tissue it affects - skin cancer on your hand would still be skin cancer, as the bones, muscles etc of your hand would still be tumorless (for the time being, anyway). The treatment would need to be specified to the type of cell involved.</p>
<p>(Take that with a grain of salt, by the way - I have no speciality and may be corrected.)</p>
<p>Nomenclature: benign/malignant
Fat- Lipoma/Liposarcoma
Skeletal muscles- Rhabdomyoma/Rahbdomyosarcoma
Smoothe muscle- Leiomyoma/Leiomyosarcoma
Cartilage - Chondroma/Chondrosarcoma
Bone - Osteoma/Osteosarcoma</p>
<p>Often, it seems to me, there is a disconnect between the specialized language of medicine and the language of patients and their friends or people just seeking to understand. The responses to this post are quite correct, but they don’t completely bridge that disconnecting gap. In general conversation we often DO hear of stomach cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer. These common names do not tell us what cell type is thought to be proliferating out of control. Instead, they tell us where the primary tumor is located. The physician delivering the diagnosis is well aware of the cell type and the technical “-oma” name, but this needs to be translated for those of us who studied something other than medicine, and since the symptoms, treatment and prognosis often depend on the location of the tumor, common names that refer to the location of the tumor are very useful. One further point that seems should be known by anyone who seeks understanding, is that many cancers, including all the ones I listed above, originate as epithelial cells proliferating out of control. Epithelial cells are in many organs; they provide the boundary between what’s INSIDE the body and what’s OUTSIDE the body. Skin is the most obvious example, but the entire gastrointestinal tract is also lined with epithelial cells, as are the secretory ducts of prostate and breast, and the alveoli (air sacs) of the lung. These cells tend to be replaced much more often than, say, a muscle cell or a fat cell, and it is entirely possible that this requirement for frequent replacement is the reason these cells are the most common sites of tumor formation.</p>