July 2017—Kisha Mitchell Richards, MBBS, once took a picture of the ocean as she went around a bend in the road traveling from Negril to Montego Bay in Jamaica. She showed that photo in the second half of a CAP16 session to prepare the audience to shift gears, as she put it, from the first speaker’s talk on medical liver disease (see “Liver injury patterns: pitfalls and pointers,” March 2017) to hers on hepatic neoplasms. “So for me, we are about to go around a bend to things of sheer beauty,” she said, referring to immunohistochemistry stains in the neoplastic liver. “Unfortunately, that which is beautiful to the pathologist is not often great for the patient. That’s our usual practice,” said Dr. Richards, a pathologist at Greenwich Hospital, Yale New Haven Health, Greenwich, Conn.
Read More »Life-threatening bleeding—what’s the right call?
June 2017—In the CAP16 session, “Your Turn: Management of the Bleeding Patient,” Theresa Nester, MD, reminded attendees who provide transfusion medicine consultation to assess the available information before calling the clinical team: patient history, drugs, coagulation test results, and products administered so far. “Your main role is to help determine why the patient is bleeding and the most appropriate treatment,” said Dr. Nester, medical director of integrated transfusion services at Bloodworks Northwest in Seattle.
Read More »Drug-induced injury: liver pathology’s big imitator
April 2017—In a presentation at CAP16 on common patterns of liver injury, Robert M. Najarian, MD, called drug-induced liver injury the great mimicker in liver pathology. “When in doubt, rule drugs out,” he said, including herbal agents, supplements, and over-the-counter agents.
Read More »Liver injury patterns: pitfalls and pointers
March 2017—Keep eyes wide open to everything and describe everything because there might be a number of different factors playing into a patient’s disease. That was the reminder Robert M. Najarian, MD, opened with last fall in his CAP16 presentation on common patterns of liver injury.
Read More »Lymphoid neoplasms: Steven Swerdlow on classification revisions
December 2016—In his CAP16 talk, “Lymphoma Diagnosis and Classification: My Search for the Holy Grail,” Steven H. Swerdlow, MD, acknowledged that the quest has been long and contentious and the resulting classification complex. Why, he asked, is lymphoma classification so complex? It reflects an explosion of knowledge about the immune system and lymphomas and an increasing number of therapeutic targets requiring increasingly precise diagnoses. In other words, it reflects the complexity of the disease itself. As oncologist Alan C. Aisenberg, MD, PhD, wrote in 1995, “The complexity of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma reflects the complexity of the lymphoid system.”
Read More »CAP16: All-star team presented with CAP and Foundation awards
October 2016—Gene N. Herbek, MD, was presented Sept. 25 with the Pathologist of the Year award during the spotlight event at the CAP16 annual meeting in Las Vegas. At the same event, Cordelia E. Sever, MD, was given the Pathology Advancement award, Sang Wu, MD, the CAP Foundation Gene and Jean Herbek Humanitarian award, Carey Zimmerman August, MD, the Outstanding Communicator award, and Denise K. Driscoll, MS, MT(ASCP)SBB, the CAP Staff Outstanding Achievement award.
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