Staging and grading

By examining cancer cells under a microscope, your cancer team can learn a great deal about the stage it has reached, and predict, by way of grading, its possible future behaviour.

With this information, doctors can create a treatment plan specifically for you and give you an indication of the outcome.

The TNM  - tumour, nodes, metastases - system of staging assesses the size of a tumour, the number of lymph nodes affected, whether the cancer has spread and if so, how far.

Cancers can also be measured on a scale of 0 to 4, where a high number indicates that the tumour is large and has spread beyond the breast and lymph nodes, leading to secondary breast cancer.

Aggressiveness is the term used to express how quickly an invasive cancer is likely to develop. And what the cells look like under a microscope allows doctors to grade aggressiveness on a scale of 1 to 3. The higher the grade the greater the chance of the cancer cells growing and spreading quickly.

Cancer spread can also be defined as node positive or node negative. Node positive means that cancer cells have reached the armpit lymph nodes; node negative means they haven’t and that the cancer is less likely to recur. Assessment of the lymph nodes in the armpit is crucial to staging and helping to predict the outcome of breast cancer.