March 2022—Most thyroid cancer cases are straightforward, but a small percentage are not. In a CAP21 molecular oncology tumor board session, Justin Bishop, MD, and Saad Khan, MD, spotlighted one of the latter.
Read More »Under one cover: grossing, staging, and reporting
July 2021—CAP Publications released this month Grossing, Staging, and Reporting—An Integrated Manual of Modern Surgical Pathology, edited by Qihui “Jim” Zhai, MD, professor of laboratory medicine and pathology, consultant pathologist, and director of the FISH laboratory, Mayo Clinic Florida. The manual consists of 12 sections—from breast to thorax—and 54 chapters, organized by organ. CAP TODAY asked Dr. Zhai to tell us about the new book.
Read More »Thyroid during pregnancy: how it changes, how to test
October 2018—How pregnancy affects normal thyroid function and thyroid function tests, and screening for thyroid disease during pregnancy, were the focus of a session at this year’s AACC annual meeting.
Read More »For certain thyroid lesions, the shift is on
July 2016—Time was running out for Yuri Nikiforov, MD, PhD, vice chair for molecular pathology and division director of molecular and genomic pathology, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. For nearly a year he had been working to assemble an international group of experts—pathologists, endocrinologists, a surgeon, and, unusually, a psychiatrist and a patient advocate—to discuss that most vexing of thyroid tumors, encapsulated follicular variant of papillary thyroid carcinoma, or EFVPTC.
Read More »Cytopathology in Focus: Managing adults with thyroid nodules and cancer—2015 guideline highlights
May 2016—In January of this year, the American Thyroid Association published the 2015 update to its guidelines for the management of adults with thyroid nodules and differentiated thyroid cancer.1 Separate guidelines were published for the pediatric population in July 2015.2 Although the guidelines for adult patients were published as a “Special Article” in Thyroid, they run the length of a small book—133 pages in total.
Read More »Thyroid cancer: In a flourish of subtypes, genes, and drivers
January 2015—Dark matter is shrinking—at least in the thyroid cancer part of the universe. Until recently, the percentage of papillary thyroid carcinomas with no known oncogenic drivers hovered around 25 percent. Now, with the publication of the most recent research effort by The Cancer Genome Atlas project, that number has shrunk considerably, to about 3.5 percent.
Read More »A laboratory on the trail of troubling TSH results
September 2014—It would be a nightmare for any laboratory professional: a misdiagnosed and mistreated patient owing to an aberrant test result. Julia C. Drees, PhD, a scientific director for chemistry at TPMG Regional Reference Laboratory, Kaiser Permanente Northern California, found herself facing that situation two years ago. She and colleague Judy Stone, PhD, then a Kaiser scientific director who is now at UCSD, discovered that faulty TSH results from their laboratory had led to multiple patients being misdiagnosed, and some even treated inappropriately.
Read More »With TSH testing, no lack of discord
June 2013—In 219 BCE, after he had unified the seven warring states to establish the nucleus of the Chinese empire, the First Emperor of China promulgated uniform administrative practices throughout the land. One section of his decree read: All men under the sky toil with a single purpose. Tools and measures are made uniform. The written script is standardized. Wherever the sun and moon shine.
Read More »With NGS, new hope for managing thyroid nodules
April 2013—Faced with assessing one of the hundreds of thousands of patients who present with thyroid nodules each year, clinicians know that the initial diagnostic steps are straightforward. With fairly good reliability, using ultrasound examination, fine-needle aspiration, and cytologic examination, they can determine in about 70 to 80 percent of cases whether the nodule is benign or malignant. And good treatment options exist for those in the latter category.
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