What is Staging?Once breast
Cancer has been found, it is staged. Staging means determining how far the cancer has progressed. Through staging, the doctor can tell if the cancer has spread and, if so, to what parts of the body. More tests may be performed to help determine the stage. Knowing the stage of the disease helps the doctor plan treatment.
Staging will let the doctor know
- the size of the Tumor and exactly where it is in the breast
- if the cancer has spread within the breast
- if cancer is present in the Lymph nodes under the arm
- if cancer is present in other parts of the body
Here are the stages of breast cancer:
Stage 0 -- This is very early breast cancer that has not spread within or outside the breast. Doctors often refer to this type of cancer as in situ or non-invasive cancer.
Stage I and stage II also are early stages of breast cancer. Stage I means that the tumor has not spread beyond the breast. In stage II, the tumor may be larger and may have spread to the lymph nodes.
Stage III is called locally advanced cancer. Here the tumor has spread beyond the breast to lymph nodes or to other tissues near the breast.
Stage IV is metastatic cancer. In this stage the cancer has spread beyond the breast and the underarm lymph nodes to other parts of the body, most often the bones, lungs, Liver, or brain.
The choice of treatment is based on many factors. For stage I, II or III cancers, the main goals are to treat the cancer and reduce the chance it will come back, either at the place where the tumor first occurred or elsewhere in the body. For stage IV cancer, the goal is to improve symptoms and prolong survival.
Standard Treatments
There are a number of treatments for breast cancer, but the ones women choose most often -- alone or in combination -- are surgery, Radiation Therapy, Chemotherapy, and hormone therapy.
Here is what the standard cancer treatments are designed to do:
- Surgery takes out the cancer.
- Hormone therapy keeps cancer cells from getting the hormones they need to survive and grow.
- radiation therapy uses high-energy beams to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors.
- Chemotherapy uses anti-cancer drugs to kill cancer cells.
Treatment for breast cancer may involve local or whole body therapy. Doctors use local therapies, such as surgery or radiation, to remove or destroy breast cancer in a specific area. Whole body, or
Systemic, treatments like chemotherapy, hormonal, or biological therapies are used to destroy or control cancer throughout the body. Some patients have both kinds of treatment.
If you have early-stage breast cancer, one common treatment available to you is a lumpectomy combined with radiation therapy. A lumpectomy is surgery that preserves a woman's breast.
In a lumpectomy, the surgeon removes only the tumor and a small amount of the surrounding tissue. The survival rate for a woman who has this therapy plus radiation is similar to that for a woman who chooses a radical
Mastectomy, which is complete removal of a breast.
If you have breast cancer that has spread locally -- just to other parts of the breast -- your treatment may involve a combination of chemotherapy and surgery. Doctors first shrink the tumor with chemotherapy and then remove it through surgery. Shrinking the tumor before surgery may allow a woman to avoid a mastectomy and keep her breast.
In the past, doctors would remove a lot of lymph nodes near breast tumors to see if the cancer had spread. Some doctors are also using a method called sentinel node
Biopsy. Using a dye or radioactive tracer, surgeons locate the first or "sentinel" lymph node closest to the tumor, and remove only that node to see if the cancer has spread.
If the breast cancer has spread to other parts of the body, such as the
Lung or bone, you might receive chemotherapy and/or hormonal therapy to destroy cancer cells and control the disease. Radiation therapy may also be useful to control tumors in other parts of the body.
