Bone and Soft Tissue Oncology

Patient and Family Education

Ewing's Family of Tumors

Stages

If a patient has one of the EFTs, the doctor will do more tests to find out if cancer cells have spread to other parts of the body. This process, called staging, is the only way to confirm a cancer diagnosis. In order to plan treatment, a doctor needs to know where the cancer is located and how far the disease has spread.

At present, there is no formal staging system for the EFTs. Instead, most patients are grouped based on whether cancer is found in only one part of the body (localized disease) or has spread from one part of the body to another (metastatic disease).

The following groups are used for all of the EFTs except Extraosseous Ewing's. Extraosseous Ewing's uses the same staging system as rhabdomyosarcoma because both are soft tissue tumors.

Localized: The cancer cells do not appear to have spread beyond the bone in which the cancer began or are found only in the bone and nearby tissues.
Metastatic: The cancer cells have spread from the bone in which the cancer began to other parts of the body. The cancer most often spreads to the lung, other bones and bone marrow (the spongy tissue inside your body's large bones that makes red blood cells). Spread of cancer to the lymph nodes or the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) is less common.
Recurrent: The cancer has come back (recurred) after it has been treated. It may come back in the tissues where it first started or it may come back in another part of the body.

This page was last updated on: September 21, 2009.