Prostate Cancer: Prognosis & Gleason Score

The stage tells your doctor the size of the tumour in your prostate and how far it has grown. The treatment choices for a cancer that is small and completely inside the prostate gland will be different to those for a cancer that has grown outside the prostate. There is more about staging prostate cancer in this section of CancerHelp UK.
The grade of your cancerYour doctor will determine your cancer's grade by looking at your cancer cells under a microscope. If your cancer cells resemble nornal prostate cells, your cancer may be at a lower grade. The more abnormal the cells appear (and so less like normal cells), the more probable it is that the cancer is at a higher grade. Generally speaking, low grade cancers tend to grow more slowly and be less likely to spread than high grade cancers. Some doctors refer to these different types of prostate cancer as grumbling (low grade) and galloping (high grade).
Your Gleason scoreYour doctor may tell you your Gleason score. This is a way of describing grade. When biopsies are taken, each area showing cancer cells is graded on a scale from 1 to 5 according to how the cells look. 1 is the lowest grade or most normal looking. 5 is the highest grade or the least normal looking. The pathologist finds the two areas with the highest grade cells and adds their scores together to give the combined Gleason score. So your Gleason score can be as low as 2 or as high as 10. Some doctors write the two scores separately, for example 3 + 4, instead of 7.

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