Breast Cancer Treatment
Breast cancer is a complicated disease. Every woman's case is distinct. Your experience may be very different from those of friends or relatives who also had breast cancer. So there is no single "best" treatment. Only you and your team of health care providers can work out the best approach for you. No matter what treatment you have, you will need regular checkups to make sure that you're staying healthy.
Doctors evaluate a woman's breast cancer in part by determining how large the tumor is and how far it's spread. This is called staging. It's just a way of summarizing your current condition. There are five basic stages, 0 through IV, and a number of sub-stages.
Staging doesn't tell the whole story. Other factors can affect your prognosis, such as the type of cancer, the speed with which the cancer is growing, your general health, your age, whether you had breast cancer before, and whether female hormones affect the cancer's growth.
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