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Prostate Cancer Grade

Grade is a measure of how aggressive your cancer is - how likely it is to spread quickly.

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Cell samples from your biopsy are analyzed by a pathologist.

The pathologist looks at the cell samples, and analyzes how much the cancer cells look differerent from healthy cells.

Healthier cells have clearly defined outlines and fairly uniform shapes. The more aggressive the cancer, the more irregular and spread out the cells look.

The pathologist grades two types of cells from your samples, the type of cell that appears most often in all your samples, and the type that appears the least often. Each type gets a Gleason grade from 1-5, 1 being the healthiest, 5 the most cancerous.

The two grades are added together to form your Gleason score.

What Gleason scores mean:

Grading is also sometimes referred to as pathological stage, which just means ‘the stage determined by a pathologist examining cells under a microscope’, as opposed to clinical stage, which means ‘the stage determined by a doctor examining a patient in a clinic’.

It is very important to get an accurate picture of the cancer's grade, as this is a very important factor in deciding when and how to undergo treatment. Improving on this level of accuracy is a major focus of scientific research.

In the future, analysis of genes (genomics) or proteins (proteomics) in cancer cell or blood samples may be able to tell you exactly how your cancer is likely to behave, based on previous behavior of cancers bearing the same genetic patterns, or the types and amounts of proteins found and how they behave. The research is very new, but could have a lot of impact.