What is staging?

When cancer of any type has been diagnosed, one of the first questions that must be asked in order to plan appropriate treatment is whether the cancer has spread to any other parts of the body. In order to answer this question, information is gathered together from a number of different sources including direct physical examination, blood tests, radiographic studies, and a number of different invasive diagnostic procedures. When enough information has been collected, an estimate is made of the extent to which a cancer has spread to other parts of the body, and the cancer is assigned a stage based on specific criteria. Determining the stage of a cancer helps to predict a patient's prognosis, and also helps to predict whether or not certain types of treatment may be effective. A number of different systems for determining the staging of different types of cancer are currently in use. Many of these are based on criteria relating to the size of a tumor, the number of lymph nodes it has spread to, and whether it has metastasized to other sites in the body (also known as TNM or Tumor, Node, Metastasis classification). Thyroid cancer is somewhat unique in that a number of different systems have been developed to determine staging. Most of them focus on weighing such factors as a patient's age, the size of a cancer at the time of diagnosis, whether the cancer has spread to invade other structures in the neck, and whether the cancer has metastasized to other sites in the body.

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