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A new study has made a glaring exposure about the breast biopsy treatments as it has suggested that the biopsy specialists often do a misdiagnosis of breast tissue during the screening. The findings have made the notion of taking second opinion true.
According to the researchers, the shocking results could potentially lead to under-treatment for some women and too-aggressive treatment for others.
The results of the study indicate that even though the pathologists are good at finding out when the invasive cancer is present in the tissues of breast, but they are less adept at doing the correct diagnosis when there prevails less serious conditions or when biopsied tissues are normal.
For the study, the researchers followed 240 breast biopsy specimens and 115 American pathologists. The researchers then matched their diagnoses against those of three experts.
The researchers said that even though it was just an experiment and may the result differ outside a research setting, but the findings expose the harsh challenges of the accurate interpretation of tissue beneath a microscope.
Lead study author Dr. Joann Elmore, from the University of Washington, said that the pathologists were able to correctly diagnose the abnormal precancerous cells nearly 50 percent of the time, which is no better than the tossing of coin.
During the study, it was found that the pathologists mistakenly found something suspicious in 13 percent of normal tissue. They also faced trouble in diagnosis of a condition known as DCIS. 13 percent of these cases were found being misdiagnosed by the pathologists as less serious, and three percent were mistaken for invasive cancer.
The findings of the study were published on Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
