A New Staging System for Cancer and Reappraisal of Early Treatment and Cure by Radical Surgery

LIKE most entities in biology, a cancer has both form and function. The form, or structure, of the cancer is manifested morphologically by its histologic type and by its anatomic size, location and extension to neighboring or distant sites. The function of the cancer is manifested clinically by such symptoms as bleeding, pain, anorexia, weight loss and incapacitation.These functional effects on the patient — the symptomatic clinical events — are carefully considered when doctors think informally about the diagnosis and management of a cancer, but not when they do formal statistical tabulations of prognosis and therapy. In most numerical . . .