Cancer stages
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Cancer stages
Grading
You may hear your doctor talk about the grade of your cancer. Tumour grade describes a tumour in terms of how abnormal the tumour cells are when compared to normal cells. It also describes how abnormal the tissues look under a microscope.
The grade gives your doctor some idea of how the cancer might behave. A low-grade cancer is likely to grow more slowly and be less likely to spread than a high-grade one.
Some types of cancer have their own grading systems but generally, there are 3 grades:
Grade 1 – the cancer cells look very similar to normal cells and are growing slowly
Grade 2 – the cells don’t look like normal cells and are growing more quickly than normal
Grade 3 – the cancer cells look very abnormal and are growing quickly
To find out more information on the stages of cancer and the grading of different types of cancer, use the search tool to search by A-Z cancer type.