Breast cancer. Deciphering your pathology report

Posted on November 1, 2010

When you have breast cancer, all the big decisions —will you get radiation, chemo, tamoxifen, etc—rest on one thing: your pathology.

Final pathology usually takes about a week after your surgery.  Frozen sections in surgery can be misleading, so wait for the final pathology.  What it will say:

What kind of cancer is it?

Grade

How big is the cancer?

Margins?

Lymphatic or vascular invasion?

How fast is it growing?  (You don’t want it to be growing faster than normal cells)

Hormone receptor status

HER 2

Lymph node status?


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