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:
“The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)