Cancer; which is a group of diseases. That takes place to the abnormal growth of a cell, which is one of the most dangerous diseases one can have. Most of the types of cancers are easy to cure when some are hard to cure. But what makes the curing of cancer more easy is the stage.
If the cancer is one the starting stage of spreading than one can cure it in less time through medications and radio-therapies. But if cancer reaches a higher stage than the chances of curing cancer get low and recovery is not always guaranteed. Now cancer is not a new disease to anyone. Almost everyone has known this term by any source. But what is still unknown to many are its stages.
It has not been until now that all the stages of cancer are known and confirmed by the research teams. Earlier before, cancer was just a disease that’s spreading and stages were not identified. What identifies the stage is the size of the tumor. Knowing how big the tumor has spread in a body can make identifying the stage and figuring out the treatment easier now. Now let’s discuss how many stages of cancer are there and how it exactly stages.
How Cancer is staged?
Doctors simply stage cancer through some exams and tests. These tests and exams show where cancer exactly is and how much has it spread in the body. Now the kind of tests that helps a doctor to stage cancer accurately includes; blood tests, physical exams, biopsy or imaging tests.
Stages:
Stage 0: the stage that undergoes a pre-cancerous change in the body.
Stage 1: here the tumor is mostly small and has not yet grown much outside the organ that it started existing in.
Stage 2: the tumor gets larger here, which means it has grown more and outside the organ, it started into nearby tissue.
Stage 3: This stage undergoes the same process as stage 2. The tumor grows during this stage and spreads in other nearby tissues.
Stage 4: In this stage, the cancer is now spread through the blood system onto a distant part of the body.
Some of the factors that affect the stage:
While diagnosing cancer and its type the TNM description is applied. It includes information about the size of the tumor and moreover, what tissues in an organ have cancer. And where or whether cancer has spread exactly. But other than this, some more factors that help in determining the accurate stage of cancer include:
- Grade
- Types of cancer cells
- Level of tumor marker
- Genetic information related to cancer.
- A person’s age.
Cancer stages don’t change:
This may come new to many but if a person is told that he/she has stage 2 cancer. Then after its treatment and recovery if cancer reappears, then it will come as stage 2 cancers again. Even if after the reappearance of cancer it has spread more in the body, still the stage of cancer will be stage 2 but that is metastatic.
