Colon Cancer Staging

Why Cancer Staging

Cancer staging is a way of identifying the cancer according to:

1. size of the cancer
2. has the cancer spread or not
3. if the cancer has spread: how far has the cancer spread

Cancer staging is done in order to have a better idea of which cancer treatment should be used. For the patient, their family and loved ones: the lower the cancer stage, the better the outlook in having a cancer cure available.

• A stage 1 cancer is the least advanced cancer and best treatable cancer stage.
• A stage 4 cancer is the most advanced and spread cancer and the least treatable cancer stage.

Metastatic liver cancer unknown primary

Take father’s metastatic liver cancer with unknown primary as an example.

Since the primary cancer is unknown, the size of that cancer is so small it cannot be detected. You could say: hip, hip hurray my cancer is only small.

Yet when your cancer cannot be detected, means it cannot be pinpointed. That means if you need to undergo chemotherapy: you need to take an overall chemotherapy to try to kill all known cancers, as you don’t have any clue which cancer you are talking about.

So size does matter and the smallest sized cancer therefore doesn’t mean the best outcome.

Size vs spread

But most important is when you talk about a primary cancer, that means father’s liver cancer is secondary.

Meaning that the primary cancer has spread (to the liver). A cancer that has spread to another organ is a stage 4 cancer: therefore most likely no cancer cure.

The latter was exactly the case, which partly explains why father never went for chemotherapy.

Read more about each stage in our next post about colon cancer staging.