Cancer staging is the process of determining the extent to which a cancer has developed by spreading. Contemporary practice is to assign a number from I-IV to a cancer, with I being an isolated cancer and IV being a cancer which as spread to the limit of what the assessment measures. The stage generally takes into account the size of a tumor, how deeply it has penetrated within the wall of a hollow organ (intestine, urinary bladder), whether it has invaded adjacent organs, how many regional lymph nodes it has metastasized to (if any), and whether it has spread to distant organs.
A low cancer stage is the most important predictor of survival, and physicians recommend cancer treatment is primarily by staging. Thus, staging does not change with progression of the disease as it is used to assess prognosis. Patients' cancer, however, may be restaged after treatment but the staging established at diagnosis is rarely changed.
Read more about Cancer Staging: TNM Staging System, Considerations in Staging, Systems of Staging, Overall Stage Grouping, Stage Migration
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