A Review of Articles From Last Month's Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine

Listed below are questions based on articles that appeared in last month's print edition of the ARCHIVES. Registered continuing medical education participants should use the October 2006 answer sheet to answer these questions.

1. In gastric and colorectal signet ring cell carcinomas, abnormal signal localization and the total absence of membranous Ecadherin and ß-catenin expression were frequently detected.

True or False?

(from Distinct Expression Patterns of E-Cadherin and ß-Catenin in Signet Ring Cell Carcinoma Components of Primary Pulmonary Adenocarcinoma-Moon et al)

2. When discussing hypothermia, which of the following statements is true?

a. mild hypothermia is not considered a medical emergency because of slow, incremental failure of thermoregulation

b. an average of 500 deaths per year in the United States result from excessive environmental cold exposure

c. deaths due to environmentally caused hypothermia occur as frequently indoors as outdoors

d. severe hypothermia grade involves a core temperature of 28

e. alcohol is rarely detected in the blood of victims succumbing to primary hypothermia

(from Hypothermia and Hyperthermia Medicolegal Investigation of Morbidity and Mortality From Exposure to Environmental Temperature Extremes-Nixdorf-Miller et al)

3. Among the patients in a recent study, only 20% of those with acute pulmonary embolism had normal values for both aminoterminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide and D-dimer.

True or False?

(from Combination of D-Dimer and Amino-Terminal Pro-B-Type Natriuretic Peptide Testing for the Evaluation of Dyspneic Patients With and Without Acute Pulmonary Embolism-Melanson et al)

4. Which of the following statements concerning entrance wounds is false?

a. typical entrance wounds have a circumferential margin of abrasion surrounding the defect produced by a bullet

b. the thin area of an eccentric margin of abrasion indicates the direction from which a bullet came

c. atypical entrance wounds are often caused by the passage of a bullet through an intermediate target before it strikes the body

d. when the muzzle of a discharged gun is in contact with skin over a bony surface, gases penetrate into the subcutaneous tissue and create a wound with a stellate or star-shaped appearance

e. a concentric margin of abrasion is produced when a bullet penetrates the skin nose-on

(from Practical Pathology of Gunshot Wounds-Denton et al)

5. In studying CD10 expression in cutaneous adnexal neoplasms, the eccrine and apocrine neoplasms determined to be immunopositive for CD10 were 2 dermal duct tumors and 1 clear cell hidradenoma.

True or False?

(from CD10 Expression in Cutaneous Adnexal Neoplasms and a Potential Role for Differentiating Cutaneous Metastatic Renal Cell Carcinoma-Bahrami et al)

6. In a study that evaluated biopsy specimens of squamous dysplastic and keratotic/hyperplastic lesions, which of the following statements concerning immunohistochemical results is false?

a. Ki-67 staining height increased with increasing degree of dysplasia

b. the percentage of cases with p16 staining was lowest among keratotic and hyperplastic lesions and increased significantly with increasing degree of dysplasia

c. no correlation between degree of dysplasia and percentage of cases staining or proportion of cells staining for Ki-67 was noted

d. keratoses/hyperplasias demonstrated a higher pRb staining height than normal and dysplastic epithelia

e. for pRb and p53, no correlation between degree of dysplasia and percentage of cases staining, staining height, or staining proportion was identified

(from Upper Aerodigestive Tract Squamous Dysplasia-Wayne & Robinson)

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