Should Grading and Staging be Semi- quantitative? The need for critical evaluation of histological features in clinical trials of therapeutic regimes has led to the generation of numerical grading and staging systems. In everyday practice, however, as already noted above, simple recording of the relevant histological features in words rather than numbers is usually more appropriate (Table 3). An overall assessment of the severity of chronic hepatitis may be made by way of summary (e.g. minimal, mild, moderate or severe chronic hepatitis), but this should be done and evaluated with caution, since it involves the morphological integration by the pathologist of many different individual features.