Your Treatment Options For The Four Stages Of Lung Cancer

Once you’ve been diagnosed with lung cancer, the next essential step is to determine the stage of your disease. Staging is critical because it’s how your doctor determines the way forward with treatment. It’s also not something that happens once. If your doctor suspects you’re not responding to the current treatment regimen, they may request that you go through the process again. How Lung Cancer Is Staged The stage of your lung cancer is generally based on the size and location of the primary tumor, if the tumor has spread to the nearby lymph nodes, and if the tumor has spread to other organs. To get this information, your doctor may recommend having a biopsy done as well as imaging tests like computed tomography (CT) scans, positron emission tomography (PET) scans, or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain. Depending on the type of lung cancer you have, the doctor will use different terms to describe what you’re dealing with. In small cell lung cancer, the abnormal cells originate in the lung tissue and this is typically staged using the numbers 0-4. Non-small cell lung cancer, on the other hand, means that abnormal cells cause the growth of carcinomas, which...