Cancer Staging

Cancer staging systems describe how far cancer has spread anatomically and attempt to put patients with similar prognosis and treatment in the same staging group. Since prognosis and treatment depend quite a bit on the stage, you can see how important it is to know what stage you have! At the same time other factors, including your general health, your own preference, and the results of biochemical tests on your cancer cells will contribute to determining the prognosis and treatment. So while the stage is important it is not everything. The concept of stage is applicable to almost all cancers except for most forms of leukemia. Since leukemias involve all of the blood, they are not anatomically localized like other cancers, so the concept of staging doesn't make as much sense for them. A few forms of leukemia do have staging systems which reflect various measures of how advanced the disease is. For most solid tumors, there are two related cancer staging systems, the Overall Stage Grouping, and the TNM system.