When someone receives a cancer diagnosis, they often feel like they are entering a foreign country that has its own language and customs. One of the first things they must do is learn a new vocabulary of sometimes intimidating words. One of those words is metastasis.
Metastasis means that cancer cells have broken away from the original tumor and traveled through the blood or lymph system to form a new tumor in other organs or tissues of the body. This process is sometimes called advanced cancer or stage 4 cancer. Cancer cells can spread to other parts of the body either at the same time as the primary tumor or later, after the cancer has gotten worse. Cancer cells can metastasize to bones, lungs, liver, brain and other areas of the body.
Most of the time, when a cancer metastasizes, it travels to a distant area because it is growing too fast in its home site and needs to escape the immune system for relief. However, a metastatic disease can also spread because of the mutations it creates in its own cells or because of problems with the blood vessels or arteries in that area.
A person’s medical history will help determine what type of metastasis they may have. The more cancer that is present in the body when a doctor starts treating the patient, the greater the risk of it spreading to other parts of the body.
When a tumor is diagnosed, doctors use a series of tests to determine the extent of the disease and how far it has spread. These include laboratory tests that analyze samples of blood or other fluids and imaging tests that make pictures of the inside of the body.
Doctors use different terms to describe how far a cancer has spread. Localized cancer has only grown into surrounding tissue and does not have any spread to other organs. Regional cancer has spread to nearby lymph nodes. Distant cancer has spread to other parts of the body, such as the lungs or the liver. These places are often called secondary or metastatic sites.
Metastatic cancer cells are usually the same as the ones that started in the original tumor, so the new cancer is still considered to be the same type of cancer even if it is in a different place. For example, if breast cancer spreads to the liver, the doctor will treat it as if it were still breast cancer.
If a person’s metastatic cancer is in their bones, they will be treated with drugs or with surgery, radiation therapy or gamma knife surgery. If the disease has spread to other organs, treatment options vary depending on where the disease is located and what type of metastatic cancer it is. If the cancer is in the lungs, for instance, doctors will use different treatments than if it was in the liver or bones. This is because the lungs have a different anatomy than other organs and are more difficult to treat.
