The Stages Of Lymphoma

Lymphoma is a progressive disease. The longer that it is present in the body, the better chance that it has to spread to other tissues and cause long-term damage to your body. To that end, doctors have devised a system of assessing what level of development that a case of lymphoma has reached in order to more accurately address the problem. In this article, we’ll let you know about the different stages that lymphoma can reach so that you can better understand how the disease takes hold of the body.

There are two factors that you need to understand to realize exactly what stage of development that a case of lymphoma is at. The two factors are known as the grade of the disease and the stage of the disease. The grade of the disease represents exactly how active the cancer is within the body, and consequently, it is the most important issue when it comes to understanding exactly what a person’s chances of successfully fighting off the disease are. The stage of the cancer denotes the amount of spreading that the tumors have done, which is also a significant piece of information that tells you a lot about a patient’s likelihood of successful treatment. First, we’ll discuss the grade of the cancer so that you can understand how severely fast the disease grows.

            There are three grades that represent different levels of severity for the disease. The lowest, and least-risky type of lymphoma, is known as low-grade, or ‘indolent’ lymphoma. Diseases of this type are of slow growth, and they may not affect a persons livelihood for years and years. For that reason, people with this type of lymphoma often employ the ‘watch and wait’ approach for treatment; that is, they closely monitor the progression of the disease to make sure that it isn’t impairing their health, and they do not undergo any of the risky types of treatment to try to remove it. The next grade of lymphoma is the intermediate grade. This grade is known as an ‘aggressive’ type of cancer, a type of lymphoma that grows and spreads at a dangerous pace. The most severe grade of lymphoma is high-grade lymphoma. This means that the disease grows very fast, and it puts the patient at a high risk for problems.

            Now, it’s time to talk about the stages of the disease. To diagnose what stage the disease is at, doctors will note the number of lymph nodes in the body that contain cancerous cells. They will also note the location of these cancerous nodes, and pay close attention to whether or not the affected nodes are found below or above the diaphragm. Also, they will want to know whether or not the cancer has spread to the other organs of the body, including the bone marrow and the spleen.

In Stage I, the cancer is still relatively non-threatening, and has not spread outside of the range of the initial tumor.

In Stage II, there are more than one tumor found in the body, but they are all found either above the diaphragm or all below the diaphragm.

Stage III lymphoma is present when tumors are found on both sides of the diaphragm, and may have spread to closeby organs.

Stage IV is the most severe stage of lymphoma. In this stage, tumors have spread to organs such as the liver and the stomach, as well as many lymph nodes.

Now that you know more about how lymphoma progresses, you can better understand how severe the disease can be without proper treatment.