• Quality of Breast Cancer Pathology Reports in three Different Hospitals in Urmia, Iran
  • Fariba Abbasi,1,* Hushyar Azari,2
    1. Solid Tumor Research Center, Cellular and Molecular Medicine Institute, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, Iran
    2. Faculty of Medicine, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, Iran


  • Introduction: This study was conducted to investigate the quality of standard criteria utilized in reporting breast cancer pathology and to compare the variability between public and private hospitals.
  • Methods: In this retrospective study, three hundred and fifty pathology reports of mastectomy samples with diagnosis of primary breast cancer were retrieved from archives of pathology departments of three hospitals in Urmia, Iran; one public teaching (121), one public nonteaching (99) and one private hospital (130). The reports were assessed according to the College of American Pathologists(CAM) criteria for macroscopic and microscopic characteristics including tumor laterality, color, size, type and grade, consistency, size of the sample, description of prior biopsy site, condition of the specimen (fresh, or in fixative), number of excised and involved lymph nodes, previous frozen section (FS), surgical margins, lymphovascular invasion and insitu carcinoma.
  • Results: None of the reports had all the suggested items. Specimen condition was the only item recorded in all of the reports. The teaching hospital reports had significantly higher number of reported items than 2 others (P<0.001). Four items including tumor laterality, sample size, number of excised lymph nodes and number of involved lymph nodes were indicated in more than 90% of reports. On the other hand, non-tumoral breast changes and previous F.S were reported in less than 10% of reports. Key items including tumor size, type and grade, surgical margin, vascular invasion, carcinoma insitu were also indicated more frequently in the teaching hospital (P<0.001).
  • Conclusion: We showed evident variations in reporting of breast cancer pathology in different hospitals. It seems that the teaching program in the public-teaching hospital can be a reason for the better results in this hospital. So we suggest using standard worldwide protocols for cancer reporting and also creating an effective audit system to evaluate complete utilization of the protocols.
  • Keywords: Breast pathology, Cancer, Reporting, tumor