What is 'apoptosis'?

What is 'apoptosis'?

I think apoptosis comes up as a question and a concern and maybe more of a question with patients doing a little searching on the internet about cancer as a diagnosis, and a lot of the experimental treatments that currently are being investigated in terms of looking at things to prevent apoptosis or induce apoptosis and that's the best way to describe that, is to describe what the term, "apoptosis," means, and it means "programmed cell death." What normally happens in your body is that as cells grow and reach a certain age, they automatically program themselves to die and get regenerated to another cell. When you have a block in apoptosis, or a block in programmed cell death, you end up with unrestricted growth, and ultimately, unrestricted growth is what leads to cancer, depending on the particular type. But unrestricted growth leads to tumor production, tumor growth, cells that shouldn't be there when they should be gone. There are lots of different experimental therapies looking at enhancing or re-initiating apoptosis when that function is no longer present.