Different stages of Cancer

Some patients are very anxious to ask their doctors "what stage of cancer am I having" when they were told they have cancer.

We understand the anxiousness, but the patients would need to know that sometimes, staging is not really accurate and survival, may not be totally related to the stage.

Briefly, cancer can be divided into 4 stages, depending on how much the disease has spread.

Stage 1 : tumor normally confines to the organ itself, and can be resected with good long term survival
Stage 2 : tumor may have extended to lymph nodes near the organ, can still be resected, but may need chemotherapy or radiotherapy to improve survival
Stage 3: tumor may have spread to further lymph nodes and sometimes surgery may not be useful and would need chemotherapy as first line treatment. Usually survival is poorer now.
Stage 4: tumor has spread to distant organ and survival is poor

However, these staging are just very general, the actual survival would depends on the type of cancer, how good the response is from the chemotherapy, how successful the surgery is etc.

Even at stage 4, sometimes there is still very good survival if the tumor responds well to the chemotherapy. So, its not the end of the world if you have stage 4 tumor. there is still hope for you.

There are also other staging of cancer, using different classifications, like TNM staging, but these are more complicated.