What is an "actinic keratoses" or "early cancer"?

What is an "actinic keratoses" or "early cancer"?

The term, pre-cancers, are usually used to explain a type of lesion on the skin called an actinic keratoses; actinic keratoses are really baby little squamous cell carcinomas that given enough time will start behaving biologically like a squamous cell carcinoma. That amount of time may be thirty years, forty years, we don't really know. As a result of that, actinic keratoses are treated by destroying them to try to prevent the transformation that they have the ability to make into squamous cell carcinomas. The intervention for actinic keratoses is much more benevolent than to have to take out a squamous cell carcinoma, which almost always entails some destructive or surgical event.