If you've been diagnosed with breast cancer, you’ll want to know what stage and grade it is. The answers will help you and your doctors know more about what’s ahead and decide on your treatments.
Doctors have many ways to find out what stage of breast cancer you have. Clues come from physical exams, biopsies, X-rays, bone scans and other images, and blood tests. A doctor called a pathologist puts tissue samples from the breast and lymph nodes under the microscope to find out even more.
In this article and inline with a publication on Webmd, we are going to look at the 3 grades of breast cancer. Keep on reading and explore new knowledge.
Breast Cancer Grades
In addition to finding out the stage of your cancer, your doctor will want to know its grade. This is a way to measure how the cells look and how fast they’re growing compared to normal cells. It will also tell them how likely the cancer is to spread to other parts of your body. The stage and grade together will help them decide on a likely outcome for your cancer and the best treatment for you.
Doctors base a cancer cell’s grade on how different it looks from normal cells. They’ll look at three different features of the cells under a microscope and assign each one a score. They add these scores together to assign a grade of between 1 and 3:
Grade 1 (well differentiated): The cells look similar to normal breast tissue and are growing slowly.
Grade 2 (moderately differentiated): The cells look slightly different from normal cells and are growing slightly faster.
Grade 3 (poorly differentiated): The cells look very different from normal cells. They’re growing quickly and are likely to spread.
Content created and supplied by: Kwajaffa (via Opera News )
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