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 November 2005 answer sheet to answer these questions.
1. On the basis of a retrospective autopsy-based study of 27 heart transplant patients, the following observation was made:
a. atherosclerosis was significantly related to mean acute rejection score
b. fibrointimal hyperplasia was significantly related to mean acute rejection score
c. patients who developed fibrointimal hyperplasia were less likely to die as a direct result of graft vascular disease
d. all of the above
e. none of the above
(from Graft Vascular Disease After Cardiac Transplantation and Its Relationship to Mean Acute Rejection Score—Alexander et al)
2. Which of the following is not true about myelodysplastic syndromes (MDSs):
a. MDSs are a heterogeneous group of clonal disorders of hematopoietic stem cells
b. MDSs are characterized by ineffective hematopoiesis, multilineage dysplasia, and peripheral cytopenias with normocellular or hypercellular marrow
c. primary or de novo MDSs predominantly affect young patients (late teens to 40 years)
d. apoptosis has been hypothesized as an explanation for the apparent paradoxical MDS phenotype of peripheral cytopenia alongside marrow cellularity
e. MDSs remain inadequately characterized disorders
(from Myelodysplastic Syndromes—Nishino & Chang)
3. Which of the following statements is true about mitochondrial respiratory dysfunction:
a. biochemical confirmation usually involves measuring respiratory chain function directly requiring skeletal muscle biopsy
b. circulating blood lymphocytes have been used to measure mitochondrial respiratory dysfunction in a group of myopathy patients
c. resazurin reduction has been used to assess mitochondrial respiratory function in rat liver mitochondria
d. a potential advantage of using resazurin as an indicator of mitochondrial function in lymphocytes is that resazurin's reduction can be assessed multiple times from a single blood sample
e. all of the above
(from Detection of Mitochondrial Respiratory Dysfunction in Circulating Lymphocytes Using Resazurin—Abu-Amero & Bosley)
4. In a tissue microarray study of 38 cases of invasive breast carcinoma with micropapillary carcinoma component versus 217 cases of invasive breast carcinoma without this component, frequent nodal metastases, higher stage, higher p53 immunopositivity, and less frequent estrogen receptor expression were features that suggested that invasive breast carcinoma with micropapillary carcinoma component would be more aggressive than invasive breast carcinoma without a micropapillary carcinoma component.
True or False?
(from Immunohistochemical and Clinicopathologic Characteristics of Invasive Ductal Carcinoma of Breast With Micropapillary Carcinoma Component—Kim et al)
5. In a review of 1712 interpretations from 33 different cases of adenocarcinoma/metastatic carcinoma tumor in liver fine-needle aspiration biopsy specimens in the College of American Pathologists Nongynecologic Cytology Program, cases with moderate amounts of granular cytoplasm and round nuclei with even chromatin were frequently misclassified as hepatocellular carcinoma.
True or False?
(from Fine-Needle Aspirates of Adenocarcinoma/Metastatic Carcinoma That Resemble Hepatocellular Carcinoma—Renshaw et al)
6. The traditional triad of error control in anatomic pathology consists of double-reading, case conferences, and consultations.
True or False?
(from Error Detection in Anatomic Pathology—Zarbo et al)