Radiotherapy may be used in the early stages of cancer or after it has started to spread. It can be used to: try to cure the cancer completely (curative radiotherapy) make other treatments more effective – for example, it can be combined with chemotherapy or used before surgery (neo-adjuvant radiotherapy)
Stage 2 cancers are typically larger than stage 1 cancers and/or have spread to nearby lymph nodes. Like stage 1 cancers, stage 2 cancers are typically treated with local therapies such as surgery or radiation therapy.
Radiation therapy
Or it may be used after surgery to kill any cancer cells that might remain. In men with cancer that has spread to other areas of the body, radiation therapy is used to relieve pain or other symptoms.
In addition to surgery and radiation therapy, stage 1 breast cancer treatment may require chemotherapy, powerful drugs that attack all fast-growing cells in the body. In the past, almost all patients had chemotherapy.
Types of cancer that are treated with radiation therapy
Brachytherapy is most often used to treat cancers of the head and neck, breast, cervix, prostate, and eye. A systemic radiation therapy called radioactive iodine, or I-131, is most often used to treat certain types of thyroid cancer.
Stage 2 means the cancer has spread outside the cervix, into the surrounding tissues. The main treatments are a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy (chemoradiotherapy), sometimes you may have surgery.
Even though Stage 0 breast cancer is considered “non-invasive,” it does require treatment, typically surgery or radiation, or a combination of the two.
Radiotherapy is usually given as a number of individual treatments delivering a small dose of radiation daily over several weeks. Most people have 5 treatments a week (one treatment a day from Monday to Friday), with a break at the weekend.
Following treatment with stereotactic radiation, more than eight in ten patients (84%) survived at least 1 year, and four in ten (43%) survived 5 years or longer. The median overall survival (OS) time was 42.3 months.
Although the overall prognosis may be poor based on cases with previous patients and older treatments, many patients with stage 4 cancer can live for years.
Cancer that cannot be cured and leads to death. Also called end-stage cancer.
"In general, cancers that have spread to the lymph nodes are typically stage 2 or 3," says Juan Santamaria, MD, Nebraska Medicine surgical oncologist. "Many of these cancers are still treatable and even curable at this stage.
Low-risk childhood acute myeloid leukemia demonstrates low recurrence rates beginning at 9%. Abbreviations: ALL, acute lymphoblastic leukemia; AML, acute myeloid leukemia; DLBCL, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma; PTCL, peripheral T-cell lymphoma; NSCLC, non-small cell lung cancer.
If you remain in complete remission for 5 years or more, some doctors may say that you are cured. Still, some cancer cells can remain in your body for many years after treatment. These cells may cause the cancer to come back one day. For cancers that return, most do so within the first 5 years after treatment.
Lung and bronchial cancer causes more deaths in the U.S. than any other type of cancer in both men and women. Although survival rates have increased over the years due to improved treatments, the outlook is still bleak. The five-year survival rate is only 22%.
There are effective treatments for many stage 3 cancers. Some stage 3 cancers can be successfully treated, but they are more likely to return after going away.
The stage assigned to your cancer at the time of diagnosis does not change, even if you later go into remission or the disease grows worse.
Based on cancer type and other factors—such as the size of the tumor and how far it has spread—stage 2 non-small cell lung cancer has a five-year survival rate of between 53% and 60%. 1 Life expectancy is influenced by several factors, not the least of which is the progression of the disease from stage 1.
Lung and bronchus cancer is responsible for the most deaths with 127,070 people expected to die from this disease. That is nearly three times the 52,550 deaths due to colorectal cancer, which is the second most common cause of cancer death. Pancreatic cancer is the third deadliest cancer, causing 50,550 deaths.
Which Type of Cancer Spreads the Fastest? The fastest-moving cancers are pancreatic, brain, esophageal, liver, and skin. Pancreatic cancer is one of the most dangerous types of cancer because it's fast-moving and there's no method of early detection.
Skin cancers are extremely common but easy to surgically remove. Basal and squamous cell carcinomas of the skin are so common, they are often excluded from studies and cancer registries, like the SEER database that was used to produce most of Table 1.