How easily and/or quickly can cancer spread around the body?

That is impossible to answer. I wish it wasn't though!

My mum has just been diagnosed with bowel cancer and we're waiting to hear how aggressive it is and if it has spread. We’ve to wait for another week for the results to come in which is torture.

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Answer:
I'm an oncologist. It very much depends on the size, type, site and aggressiveness of the individual tumour. There’s a huge variation. Basal cell skin cancer, for example, never spreads to other parts of the body, it just grows and invades locally. Other cancers, such as small cell lung cancer, have usually spread by the time they are diagnosed. For each type of tumour, there are particular features which can predict for metastatic spread - such features are used, for example, when deciding whether or not to give a patient 'adjuvant' chemotherapy after surgery. Breast cancer is probably the ideal example - at the time of surgery, it is impossible to state whether or not a patient may have microscopic spread to other parts of the body - the danger of metastatic spread is based on tumour type, size, grade, Her2 status and lymph node status. So patients with small, low-grade, node-negative tumours might not require 'adjuvant' chemo, while those with big, node-positive tumours undoubtedly do require chemo.

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Answer:
Almost from inception, a tumor might shed cells into the circulation. From animal models, it is estimated that a 1-cm tumor sheds > 1 million cells/24 h into the venous circulation. Even though most circulating tumor cells die as a result of intravascular trauma, a tiny number (much less than 1 in 1 million) adhere to the vascular endothelium and penetrate into surrounding tissues, generating independent tumors (metastases) at distant sites. Metastatic tumors grow in much the same manner as primary tumors and might subsequently give rise to other metastases.

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Answer:
I think it depends on the cancer - some more quicker than others. My mum has skin cancer on her arm, and they said if she left it one more day it would have gone to the bone, but because she went that day they got it out. Now she just has checkups.

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Answer:
depends what type of cancer it is

http://www.cancerbackup.org.uk/Home

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Answer:
That really does depend on where in the body the cancer is to be honest. Without treatement it does spread.

Rose I don;t know what to say except I'm so sorry.