What Patients Should Know About Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer Progression?
What Patients Should Know About Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer Progression from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What’s vital for non-melanoma skin cancer patients to know about disease progression? Dr. Soo Park explains the stages of non-melanoma skin cancer and what it means to have advanced skin cancer.
Dr. Soo Park is a Medical Oncologist at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health. Learn more about Dr. Park.
Related Resources:
Advanced Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer Test Results | Understanding YOUR Disease | Advances in Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer Treatment and Monitoring | Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer Staging | What Patients Should Know |
Transcript:
Katherine:
How do these cancers typically progress? What are the stages?
Dr. Park:
Yeah, so, if it’s just a really small cancer like that’s on your face, it’s typically an early stage or a stage I. And I’m specifically talking about squamous cell skin cancer, because actually for basal cell, we don’t have any formal staging for basal cell.
Katherine:
Why is that?
Dr. Park:
It just wasn’t included in the staging systems. So, for basal cell, there’s no formal staging criteria, but we’ll stage it as early stage based on what we think, as a clinician, when we see you; or if we get imaging and we see that it’s spread to other areas, it may be later stage. But for squamous cell skin cancer, it’s earlier stage depending on the size. Sometimes when we get a biopsy, and in the biopsy, if we find high risk things in the biopsy, that may actually put you at a higher stage, even if the cancer is somewhat small.
So, that could be like a stage III. But if at any point we find on imaging that the cancer has spread elsewhere – so, like you have a cancer that has spread to your liver, or to your lungs, or to the bones in your body, that’s a stage IV.
Katherine:
Okay. And when is the cancer considered advanced?
Dr. Park:
I think the cancer would be considered advanced if it’s not something that a surgeon can simply just remove. So, the dermatologist cannot just do a standard Mohs surgery, or the head-and-neck surgeon cannot just do a standard surgery, because advanced means that the cancer is either pretty deep, pretty large; or the surgeon can do surgery, but that means that the surgery would be very disfiguring. Sometimes these lesions can be really big on the face.
And sure, the surgeon could do the surgery, but if we have to take part of your eye, or part of your nose or your ear, and you have to have major reconstruction, that’s considered probably more of an advanced tumor.