Cancer Types
Understanding what type of cancer you have and what stage it’s in is absolutely essential in order to find the most effective treatment. Treatment begins with research and research will land no results unless you know what you’re searching for. Understanding Cancer Types and Stages and knowing where as a cancer patient you stand is the first step on your way to curing this disease. Let’s take a closer look at cancer types in this article:
Researching Cancer Types and Stages
If you’ve been diagnosed with cancer, make sure you clarify the following with your doctor:
- What’s the cancer type I have (what’s its name)?
- What is the stage of my cancer?
If you can, try to also find out the following:
- What’s the grade of my cancer?
- Are there any other prognostic factors?
To initiate a successful research on your cancer, you need to get answers to the above mentioned questions from your doctor. Ask him what the medical name of your cancer is and what stage of your tumor is. The stage will likely be a Roman numeral between I and IV (Roman numeral one to Roman numeral four), of your stage could be “recurrent”. If the grade of your cancer is known, ask to learn about that. If there were any special tests done on your tumor, ask about results of those as well.
It’s also helpful to obtain copies of biopsy and pathology reports as well as any operative reports there might be. These will be particularly helpful if you get serious about studying your type of cancer and get yourself more technical literature.
Cancer Types
Cancer treatment methods vary and depend on cancer type you have. What cancer type you have will be determined by which organ this cancer starts in, which cells it derives from and what appearance this cancer cell takes. As you have learned from article that explains what cancer is and what causes it, cancer starts with one cell which begins to divide uncontrollably. As an abnormal cell multiplies at high speed, eventually this form of abnormal cells develops into a tumor.
Tumor which forms around the cell which started this uncontrolled division is called the “primary” tumor. Cells from the primary tumor can break off and travel to other parts of the body and start the growth of secondary tumors there. This is called “metastasis”. However, metastasis does not change the cancer type. That means that if your cancer type is “colon cancer” (cancer which started in the colon) which has spread through metastasis to form a secondary tumor on your liver, the cancer type of that tumor will not be “liver cancer”. It will be a metastatic colon cancer. Similarly, if your cancer type is breast cancer and it spreads to your bones, cancer type will not change to “bone cancer”, it will be “metastatic breast cancer”.
It is not uncommon for different types of cancer to start in the same organ. For example there are three different cancer types that start in the kidneys, each of them requiring different method of treatment. Renal cell cancer is the most common kidney cancer, Wilm’s tumor is common in kidneys of children, transitional cell cancer is a kidney cancer type similar to bladder cancer. Just because they all originated in kidneys, it doesn’t make them all the same cancer type. They are each different and each require different therapy. That’s why it is so important to know your cancer type otherwise you could be researching the options which are ineffective for the cancer type you have.
Another common mistake when performing a research on your cancer type is to search for broad class of cancer. For example if you have adenocarcinoma cancer which is the cancer of lining cells derived from cells of glandular origin, research on proper treatment would not return relevant results as there are several classes of this cancer. There is an adenocarcinoma of the lung and there also is an adenocarcinoma of the pancreas. These are both different cancer types, each requiring different treatment.