Some researchers have estimated that if Americans stopped smoking, lung cancer deaths could virtually be eliminated within 20 years. With the development of new drugs and treatments, the number of deaths among cancer patients under 30 years of age is decreasing, even though the number of deaths from cancer is growing overall. A neoplasm is described as being relatively autonomous because it does not fully obey the biological mechanisms that govern the growth and the metabolism of individual cells and the overall cell interactions of the living organism. Some neoplasms grow more rapidly than the tissues from which they arise, others grow at a normal pace but because of the other factors eventually become recognizable as an abnormal growth and not normal tissue. The changes seen in neoplasm are heritable in that these characteristics are passed on from each cell to ots offspring, or daughter cells.
Neoplasm occurs only in muticellular organisms.
The main classification of the neoplasms as either benign or malignant relates to their behavior. Several relative differences classify these two classes. A benign neoplasm, for instance, is harmless, but malignant is not. Malignancies grow more rapidly than do benign forms and invade adjacent normal tissues. Tissue of a benign tumor is structured in a manner similar to that of the tissue from which it is derived, malignant tissue, however, has an abnormal and unstructured appearance.