Posts Tagged ‘immunohistochemistry’

Tubular Carcinoma

Question: Hello: I am a 50 year old premenopausal female. I had a 2.5 mm tubular carcinoma diagnosed in Dec 2010 and had a simple mastectomy and neg SNB. I then had a prophylactic mastectomy in March of the other side. There were atypical hyperplastic lobular and ductal cell changes in the remainder of [...]

Invasive Lobular vs. Invasive Ductal Carcinoma

Question: What is the difference between invasive lobular and ductal carcinoma? My first biopsy I had at my ultrasound said “invasive lobular carcinoma grade 2/3″ and my surgery biopsy said “invasive ductal carcinoma grade 2/3″. Does this make any difference?

Second Opinion Pathology Talk

I recently gave a talk on second opinions in breast pathology at the 21st Annual Conference of the National Consortium of Breast Centers in Las Vegas. A modified version of that talk is available here as a pdf:
Second_Opinion_Pathology
The first part of the talk covers some of the data in the literature and the second part [...]

Prognostic Marker Changes in Metastatic Breast Cancer

There is a recent study published in the September 23 issue of Breast Cancer Research that looked at changes in prognostic markers (estrogen/progesterone receptor and HER2/neu) between primary breast cancers and metastatic lesions. If you click on the Breast Cancer Research link it will provide you with the abstract.  The full article is temporarily free from [...]

Can Breast Cancer Be Diagnosed On a Bone Marrow Biopsy?

Question: My 75 y/o mother who was sent to an oncologist due to a bone scan that showed a hot spot on the right rib. A bone marrow biopsy/aspir was done and she was diagnosed with breast cancer with mets to the spine-results were ER/PR +. Mammograms, cat scans, Petscans were neg. She [...]

New Research on Using Immunohistochemistry to Predict Response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy

In the online “early view” section of the journal Cancer there is a new research article proposing that using three currently-used immunohistochemical breast markers in a group of patients who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy, doctors can sub-type cancers similar to those described by molecular profiling.  They also suggest these sub-types are associated with different responses to treatment and overall survival. [...]

Equivocal HER2 Results

Question: I am in the Uk and my wife (42) has Grade 2 breast cancer 2 nodes er+ and pr + my question is about her path report: the HER2 was registered at 2.2 after the FISH test – does this mean that herceptin will work or is it to borderline to benefit? As the [...]