Why is it called “non-small” with like cancers and stuff? Why not like “large?” “Non-small” doesn’t seem very descriptive. You don’t go to McDonald’s and order “non-small” fries. They’d be like “Ok then, what fucking size do you want?”
In: Biology
Medicine student here:
iI’veonly seen that when talking about carcinomas, you can have small cell carcinoma, that means a tumor, malignant and formed by small cells, that means its formed by a type of cells called ”small cells” not by cells that are small in size, so a small cell carcinoma is a tumor of ”small cells’ but the size can be whatever size it is…
So a non-small cell tumor is a tumor that is not a small cell tumor, this is a good term to use since small cell carcinomas need one treatment and non-small cell carcinomas need another
It’s like Hodgkin/non-hodgkin linfomas
when we want to talk about the size of a tumor etc we usually use the TNM scale. T for ”size” N for affected lymph nodes and M for metastasis, so you can have a T4N3M0, a tumor of size 4 with 3 affected lymph nodes and no known metastasis
The TNM system helps us decide how to treat and operate a tumor and what to expect from it
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