Malignancy
medical description of a continuously destructive illness; tendency of a medical condition to become progressively worse; characterization of cancer, characterized by anaplasia, invasiveness, and metastasis
Malignancy (from Latin male 'badly' and -gnus 'born') is the tendency of a medical condition to become progressively worse; the term is most familiar as a characterization of cancer.
A malignant tumor contrasts with a non-cancerous benign tumor in that a malignancy is not self-limited in its growth, is capable of invading into adjacent tissues, and may be capable of spreading to distant tissues.
A benign tumor has none of those properties, but may still be harmful to health. The term benign in more general medical use characterizes a condition or growth that is not cancerous, i.e. does not spread to other parts of the body or invade nearby tissue. Sometimes the term is used to suggest that a condition is not dangerous or serious, although this is not always the case.
Malignancy in cancers is characterized by anaplasia, invasiveness, and metastasis. Malignant tumors are also characterized by genome instability: cancers, as assessed by whole genome sequencing, frequently have between 10,000 and 100,000 mutations in their entire genomes. Cancers usually show tumour heterogeneity, containing multiple subclones. They also frequently have reduced expression of DNA repair enzymes due to epigenetic methylation of DNA repair genes or altered microRNAs that control DNA repair gene expression.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Malignancy” as medical description of a continuously destructive illness; tendency of a medical condition to become progressively worse; characterization of cancer, characterized by anaplasia, invasiveness, and metastasis. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as medical description of a continuously destructive illness; tendency of a medical condition to become progressively worse; characterization of cancer, characterized by anaplasia, invasiveness, and metastasis. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1483951. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Malignancy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.