Stage
Staging is the process of determining how much cancer there is in the body and where it is located. The underlying purpose of staging is to describe the extent or severity of an individual's cancer, and to bring together cancers that have similar prognosis and treatment. Staging of breast cancer is one aspect of breast cancer classification that assists in making appropriate treatment choices, when considered along with other classification aspects such as estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor levels in the cancer tissue, the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2/neu) status, menopausal status, and the person's general health.
Staging information that is obtained prior to surgery, for example by mammography, x-rays and CT scans, is called clinical staging and staging by surgery is known as pathological staging.
Pathologic staging is more accurate than clinical staging, but clinical staging is the first and sometimes the only staging type. For example, if clinical staging reveals stage IV disease, extensive surgery may not be not helpful, and (appropriately) incomplete pathological staging information will be obtained.
Read more about this topic: Breast Cancer Classification
Famous quotes containing the word stage:
“Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics.”
—Harold Clurman (1901–1980)
“But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man’s bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)