March 2013—In patients with diabetes mellitus, hemoglobin A1c testing frequency is largely in line with recommended guidelines. In those same patients, LDL testing is not performed frequently enough, and urine protein testing frequency falls far short of recommendations.
Read More »March 2013
From the President’s Desk: Look to pathways for opportunities
March 2013—Regular readers know that the CAP has spent the past several years exploring how we can ensure a bright future for pathology. The future, of course, as my adult children would quip, is “ours, but also ours to lose.”
Read More »Policing blood use pays off for Allina Laboratories
March 2013—A January study of almost 1,000 patients with acute gastrointestinal bleeding has found that restrictive blood transfusion strategies produce better patient outcomes. The study, “Transfusion strategies for acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding,” discovered that patients with severe acute upper GI bleeding who received blood transfusions when their hemoglobin levels fell below 7 g/dL, rather than 9 g/dL, had higher probabilities of survival at six weeks, as well as reduced rates of further bleeding and fewer adverse events (Villanueva C, et al. N Engl J Med. 2013;368:11–21).
Read More »Molecular walk-through for CRC testing
March 2013—For pathologists and clinicians alike, molecular testing can carry shades of a Pinter play: a seemingly straightforward situation with a whiff of discomfort, if not outright menace, and bedeviled by shifting characters and layers of meaning that defy snap interpretations.
Read More »TB or not TB? Newer assays settle in
March 2013—Though tuberculosis is primarily diagnosed and treated in the public health system, there’s a need for greater knowledge about TB in the private sector, says Sundari Mase, MD, MPH, of the CDC’s Field Services and Evaluation Branch, Division of Tuberculosis Elimination. Among private physicians, she says, “there is little institutional knowledge about TB.” When Dr. Mase sees patients, often she’ll note diagnostic delays in recognizing TB, “delays that occur because physicians aren’t thinking about TB.”
Read More »What happened when lab set sights on parasites
March 2013—When Bobbi S. Pritt, MD, director of clinical parasitology and virology in the Division of Clinical Microbiology at Mayo Clinic, set out to improve test utilization among the physicians for whom her laboratory performs assays, she figured that knowledge was power. Simply educate the clinicians, she thought, and surely they would begin to order the most appropriate tests for their patients.
Read More »Houston study augurs possible shift in hrHPV genotypes
March 2013—First identified in an HIV patient in 1998, HPV 90 is a genotype of the human papillomavirus that, until now, has received little attention. It is not counted as one of the few well-defined high-risk genotypes, like HPV 16 and HPV 18, that are known to cause the majority of cervical cancer cases.
Read More »Put it On The Board, 3/13
March 2013—FDA clears ALK automated gene scanner; precision medicine center at Weill Cornell, NY-Presbyterian; sequence-based system cleared for HLA typing; Abbott to collaborate on companion CLL test; Cepheid, OHSU to develop oncology assays for Xpert; Clarient adopts Qiagen KRAS; test could reduce number of repeat biopsies; and Ventana, Biocare sign p63 license agreement.
Read More »Q & A, 3/13
March 2013—Submit your pathology-related question for reply by appropriate medical consultants. CAP TODAY will make every effort to answer all relevant questions. However, those questions that are not of general interest may not receive a reply. For your question to be considered, you must include your name and address; this information will be omitted if your question is published in CAP TODAY.
Read More »Newsbytes, 3/13
March 2013—LIS purchase contracts: a bore you can’t ignore; Federal government releases update to Connect software; Siemens Healthcare targets uptime with data connection; Vendors acquire new clients, upgrade software for others
Read More »Anatomic Pathology Selected Abstracts, 3/13
March 2013—Immunohistochemical assay versus Oncotype DX qRT-PCR assay for estrogen and progesterone receptors; accuracy and precision of endometrial intraepithelial neoplasia diagnosis; histologic patterns and molecular characteristics of lung adenocarcinoma; MicroRNA expression profiling as a diagnostic tool for thyroid cancer; inflammation and preneoplastic lesions in benign prostate as risk factors for prostate cancer; and reclassification of serous ovarian carcinoma using a two-tier system.
Read More »Clinical Pathology Selected Abstracts, 3/13
March 2013—Fasting time and lipid levels in a community-based population; utility of point-of-care testing in emergency department triage; and prognostic value of plasma lactate levels in patients with acute pulmonary embolism.
Read More »