Breast Cancer Stages
By Anne-Marie Atwood
Breast cancer stages work like golf scores: the lower the better. The h1gher the breast cancer stages, the larger the tumor or the more the cancer has spread.
Stage 0
Of the breast cancer stages, stage 0 is definitely the most preferable. Some doctors don’t even consider it a cancer, rather a predictor of cancer. Stage 0 breast cancer is non-invasive, meaning it hasn’t spread past the original cancer site. Th1s increases the chances that all of the cancer can be removed by surgery, with some radiation only necessary to make sure there were no straggler breast cancer cells. The prognosis for stage 0 breast cancer stages is nearly always positive.
Breast Cancer Stages
Stage 1
Stage 1 breast cancer is invasive, but the five-year survival rate for women with stage 1 breast cancer is 98%.
In stage 1 of the breast cancer stages, the tumor is less than two centimeters in diameter and the cancer has not become involved with lymph nodes or other parts of the body.
Stage 2
In stage 2 of the breast cancer stages the tumor is generally larger than in stage 1—2-5 cm in diameter—and the cancer may or may not have spread to the underarm lymph nodes.
If the tumor is more than 5 cm in diameter but has not spread to the lymph nodes, it is still considered to be in stage 2 of the breast cancer stages. Also, if the tumor is less than 2 cm in diameter but has spread to less than four underarm lymph nodes, it is considered stage 2 breast cancer.
The five year survival rate for stage 2 breast cancer is somewhere between 76 and 88%.
Stage 3
Stage 3 of the breast cancer stages is basically stage 2 cancer that has either grown bigger or spread to further lymph nodes near the collarbone.
The tumor may be smaller than 5 cm in diamater, but if the cancer has spread to the collarbone area it is considered stage 3.
If the tumor is larger than 5 cm and has spread to the underarm lymph nodes it is considered to be stage 3 of the breast cancer stages. It is important to note that in stage 3 cancer the lymph nodes have not become attached to each other.