What is stage four cancer?

Spread: Cancer that has spread outside of where it started.

Worst prognosis: Stage four signifies the group of patients that have the worst survival for a particular cancer. Depending on the cancer it may have zero survival rate or can have a percentage of patients that can be cured. Staging is used to determine what is the best treatment for the patient.

Cancer spread: There are 4 stages of cancer. Stage 4 means the cancer has spread from the starting organ into another organ. Examples: breast cancer into bone, colon cancer into liver. Stage 4 cancers are usually not cured surgically and often require chemotherapy. The goal of treating stage 4 cancer is to prolong life and ease suffering. Rarely some stage 4 cancers are cured...Think lance armstrong!

Stages vary: ...With cancer type, but stage 4 usually is the highest stage, and refelcts travel to another organ most of the time. An exception is head neck cancer, wher stage IV generlly indicates locally advanced disease, not approachable by surgery (alone at least). Some consider that tumors progress from stage i in an organized fashion through each of the stages. Simplistic and not helpful.

Cancer has spread: Generally speaking, stage IV cancer is cancer that has spread to other parts of the body. Each cancer has its own staging system however, so this isn't true for all types of cancer.

Stage IV: Stage four generally means that the tumor has spread to organs or sites other than the one it arose in. In some cases it can be related to the extent of local invasion, where it grows directly into neighboring structures. Hope this helps.

Stage four: It usually indicates that the cancer has spread to "distant" sites through the blood stream to organs such as lung, bone, liver, brain, etc., and is usually not curable, but frequently controllable for varying periods of time.

Stage Four: When the disease have become metastasis to lung, liver, or bones, etc.