What factors could impact how a non-melanoma skin cancer is staged? Skin cancer expert Dr. Barbara Ma reviews key considerations that impact the cancer stage, including classification, lesion size and disease spread.
Dr. Barbara Ma, is Cutaneous Oncologist and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and an Assistant Attending Physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Learn more about Dr. Ma.
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Transcript
Jamie Forward:
How is non-melanoma skin cancer staged?
Dr. Barbara Ma:
Sure. So, we look at the size of the lesion. And then, well, and we also try to classify them. We talk about high- risk lesions or low-risk lesions. And really, they talk about it as high-risk location.
And as I mentioned before about the UV sun damage as a risk factor, the high-risk locations actually are the sun-exposed spots. Such as face, scalp. And in terms of staging, besides looking at the size, we also look at is there any lymph node involvement? And if so, that usually would upstage it to a more advanced stage. Or if it’s spread to different parts of the body, then that would be a stage IV.
But most of the time, for squamous and basal – more commonly, if it grows to a more advanced stage, it’s usually because it’s a lesion that got neglected or ignored over a long period of time. The behavior of it, most of the time, is that it slowly grows. And so, that’s why, again reinforcing the early detection very highly treatable part.
Jamie Forward:
Okay. And so, when it comes to these tests and the test results – are there specific questions that patients should be asking about their test results?
Dr. Barbara Ma:
In terms of questions that they should ask about the test results, things to ask would be, “Is there lymph node involvement? Is there imaging that I should do to try to evaluate for lymph node involvement?” We do do a lymph node exam, and if there is something that’s – or if it’s a really big lesion – then we would do usually CAT scans as imaging to try to assess if there’s any other areas of involvement.