What Is Secondary Bone Cancer?
There are two types of cancers that a doctor can diagnose. The first is called a primary cancer; the other is called secondary cancer. Cancers come in many forms and are labeled in different stages from a diagnosis of stage 1 to the worst case scenario of cancers in stage 4. Being diagnosed with stages 1, 2 or 3, doctors are able to give their patients a fighting chance. Unfortunately, with stage 4 cancer, your disease has usually spread to too many different parts of your body making it extremely difficult if not impossible to end up beating the disease. Secondary bone cancer is one that generally is treated easier than more advanced of sarcomas.
Primary bone cancer is a disease that begins in your bone. There are 3 types of bone cancers; Osteosarcoma, Ewing’s Sarcoma and Chondrosarcoma. Osteosarcoma and Ewing’s Sarcoma are usually diagnosed in children and young adults while Chondrosarcoma is normally found in people over the age of 50 years old. It is not clear why, but Caucasian males are more likely to be diagnosed with any type of bone cancer than those of women or of African-American or Asian descent. If your primary cancer of the bone has not metastasized, or spread to other regions of your body, it is fairly treatable with a course or two of chemotherapy or radiation after the surgical removal of your tumor. You will be given a stage 1 cancer diagnosis, which is the best case scenario.
In secondary bone cancer, a malignant cancer from another part of the body has metastasized into your bone region. When this happens, doctors will not treat you for bone cancer, but rather for the disease where the cancer originated in. For example, if you were diagnosed with bone cancer but it was discovered to have started out as lung cancer, your course of treatment will be for lung cancer. Clearly this is not a stage 1 type of cancer as the disease has obviously metastasized from another region in your body. It is possible that you could get a stage 2 or 3 diagnosis, but often times, if a cancer has spread a significant distance in your body, you will receive a stage 4 diagnosis which means you are in for an uphill battle.
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