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Pathological Reporting and Staging Following Pancreatic Cancer Resection

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Pancreatic Cancer

Abstract:

The clinical management of cancer relies on robust pathological data for the assessment of the extent of the disease, in order to plan the best care for the individual patient. Although general guidelines for the handling and pathology reporting of pancreatic specimens exist and are constantly updated by professional pathology committees, no uniform and widely accepted standardized protocol for the examination of pancreatic surgical specimens is currently available. In particular, there is no consensus regarding the definition of the relevant margins of the surgical specimens and the definition of microscopic residual disease. This is reflected in the discrepancy between the high rates of local recurrence of pancreatic cancer and the reported curative resection rates. In this chapter the potential causes for this lack of standardization in the pathology reporting for pancreatic cancer are discussed and a possible consensus protocol for the specimens’ dissection, which also takes into account the biological characteristics of this extraordinary aggressive neoplasm, is presented.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Pathology, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Munich, Germany

    Irene Esposito

  2. Institute of Pathology, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany

    Diana Born

  3. Institute of Pathology, Inselspital, University of Bern,  , Switzerland

    Irene Esposito

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  1. Irene Esposito
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  2. Diana Born
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Esposito, I., Born, D. (2010). Pathological Reporting and Staging Following Pancreatic Cancer Resection. In: Pancreatic Cancer. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-77498-5_41

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