Cancer staging

Before determining the most appropriate treatment plan for individual patients, specialists at Barts Cancer Centre use a range of tests and scans to assess the location of the cancer, whether it has spread and how far it has progressed.

If a cancer has spread, it usually extends from the organ it originated from, then reaches the lymph glands (nodes) related to that organ, and can ultimately spread to different parts of the body such as bones, lungs etc. The tests and scans used at Barts Cancer Centre to diagnose the cancer will give some information about the stage of the disease.

There are two ways of describing the ‘cancer stage'. It may be numbered, usually stage 1 to stage 4, and this is still used in describing the stage of some cancers. The other is the tumour, node and metastasis (TNM) system - a staging system that is the most commonly used in the world for all cancers. The T stands for tumour; the N for nodes and the M for metastases (the medical word for cancer spread). With this combination of letters and numbers, doctors can describe the size of the cancer and whether it has spread to lymph nodes or elsewhere in the body.