The stages of lung cancer are virtually the same; however, there are many different ranking or staging systems that doctors and professions use to rate the cancer and use that to develop an applicable treatment program.

The reason that cancer staging is important is for the reason that it allows the doctor to assess the cancer and then work with the medical team to make sure that you are in fact put on the best possible treatment course.

Any cancer type is able to be ranked through a type of staging system. If it’s a lower stage it isn’t going to require such an aggressive form of treatment. With the less aggressive types of cancer you’re going to find these are confined to a smaller area thus easier to treat for elimination. The higher the stage of the cancer the more aggressive the treatment needed and sometimes even to the point of being deemed an untreatable cancer. The higher stages are highly relentless, highly aggressive and very wide spread.

Staging Systems

Zero to Four

One of the most common systems for staging cancer goes on the zero to four going from least to most aggressive. In this stage zero would of course be the least severe of the cancers and four would be the absolute in terms of aggressiveness on this scale.

You will find sometimes that it might be staged in Roman numerals with even sub breakdowns sometimes too; such as:

• 1
• 1a
• 1b
• 2
• 2a
• And so forth…

The reason sub breakdowns are used for those cancers that will fall right slightly between two stages.

TNM

There will be some doctors using the TNM classification of cancer staging. This ranks the cancer with three parameters:

• The tumor size
• Metastasis
• Lymph node involvement

Location Specific

There are other oncologists that are going to refer to the cancer simply as in situ, localized, regional or distant.

• In situ cancer is one that is only a few small cells which are either lucky to have been caught slowly or simply develop extremely slowly.
• Regional cancer is a cancer that is contained to one region of the body but has started its spread to other near organs and lymph nodes.
• Distant cancer is one that has started to spread from origin to remote areas of the body which is reflective of a very widespread metastasis

Final Thoughts

You’ll find that doctors might sometimes disagree over a staging assessment on cancers. If you choose to seek a second opinion you’re likely going to find some contradictory information. If you seek more than one opinion and they disagree on their answers make sure that you ask them what makes them disagree and their treatment and how it would or would not differ.