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WHAT DOES "MALIGNANT" MEAN 

First broadcast on www.provet.co.uk  


This information is provided by Provet for educational purposes only.

You should seek the advice of your veterinarian if your pet is ill as only he or she can correctly advise on the diagnosis and recommend the treatment that is most appropriate for your pet.

The term malignant is widely used in veterinary medicine- but what does it mean ?

In the New Collins Concise Dictionary the term "malignant" is define as "tending to cause great harm, injurious", and in pathology it means "uncontrollable or resistant to therapy".

In veterinary medicine "malignant" is used to describe the most serious forms of disease. It is most often used in connection with cancer and in malignant cancers the cells:

  • Grow quickly
  • Invade nearby tissues
  • Break up easily and spread to other parts of the body via the bloodstream or the lymphatics. There they can cause secondary cancers in vital tissues such as the liver, lungs or brain. This process of spread of a malignant tumour is called metastasis and it makes the cancer life-threatening and so the prognosis is much worse.

The malignant  nature of a cancer can usually be told by examining samples taken from the tumour site under a microscope, and this forms the basis of many screening tests and is the reason why biopsies of lumps are frequently taken for laboratory examination.

Occasionally the term malignant is also used to describe other serious forms of disease for example :

  • Malignant hyperthermia (out of control increase in body temperature)
  • Malignant oedema (accumulation of water in the body tissues)
  • Malignant icterus (jaundice - accumulation of yellow pigments in the tissues)

 Updated October 2013