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When you’re diagnosed with ovarian cancer, your medical team will want to find out:

• the size of the cancer (tumour) and if it has spread to other parts of your body, beyond the ovaries. This is called the stage.
• which part of the ovary it comes from and what type of cells the tumour has grown from. This is called the type of ovarian cancer.
• how different the cancer cells look compared to normal cells. This is called the grade.

Understanding the stage, type and grade of the cancer can help you when talking about your diagnosis and treatment plan with your medical team.

Finding out the stage of the cancer is an important part of your diagnosis because it impacts your treatment options. To find out the stage of the cancer your treatment team will:

• use scans such as a CT or MRI scan
• examine you during surgery

An international system of staging uses a number from 1 to 4 to describe how much cancer there is and if it has spread. You can read through what each stage means in the stages tool below. For ovarian cancer, the staging system is called the FIGO system. It stands for the Fédération Internationale de Gynécologie et d'Obstétrique, known as the International Federation of Gynaecological Oncologists in English.   

Fallopian tube cancer is also staged from 1 to 4. Primary peritoneal cancer is staged as either early or advanced rather than with the FIGO system of numbers. Both of these cancers are treated in a similar way to ovarian cancer because they behave in the same way and respond to similar treatments.

Use the stages tool below to find out what the different stages and substages of ovarian cancer mean. The tool shows staging for tumours that start in the ovaries and/or fallopian tubes. It doesn’t show the staging of primary peritoneal cancer.

To get started, click on the tabs along the top.