Identifying the Stages of Cancer
Author: John Published Under: Health
Cancer is a disease that affects people of all ages from all over the world. Specifically cancer affects the cells of the body, causing changes to the actual genetic information of the cell to change. Cancer does not develop overnight, but instead can take years to develop, as the cells are changed one step at a time.
It is not possible to predict when the changes will occur or how rapidly the cells will change from healthy cells to cancerous ones. As a result, some cells can change very rapidly, causing the cancer to quickly spread and cause death within a few months, while others develop so slowly that the individual does not die from cancer, but instead other factors.
To help determine what part of the development process the cancer is at, doctors break down the cancer into different stages. The type of stage determines what type of treatment will be preformed.
There are 4 basic stages of cancer:
- Stage 1: The cancer cells can be identified and the cancer is localized, which means it is only present in one part of the body. During stage 1, the tumor can usually be removed, eliminating the cancer.
- Stage 2: The cancerous tumor has become enlarged and might have begun to spread to other nearby tissue and lymph nodes.
- Stage 3: The cancerous tumor is continously growing and has spread to the areas around the tumor.
- Stage 4: The tumors have spread throughout the body.
Treatment of cancer can be greatly affected by how quickly the cancer is diagnosed, with early detection greatly increasing the chance of succssful treatment. For example, while in stage 1, it is often possible to preform a surgery and remove the tumor.
However, as the disease develops and begins to spread, it becomes much more difficult to treat. What could once be treated by local therapy, which is when the therapy only targets the tumor itself, will now require the entire body to be treated. Not only is this more difficult, but systemic cancer treatments, which treat the entire body, usually damage healthy cells as well as cancerous ones.