Publications by authors named "Kyra B Berg"

Tumour to tumour metastases are uncommon, and we report a case of carotid body paraganglioma metastatic to a hepatocellular adenoma. A 54-year-old man presented after a CT chest for chronic cough that incidentally identified two liver lesions in segment 3 and caudate. The imaging findings were suspicious for atypical haemangiomas versus hepatocellular adenoma.

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Malignant colorectal polyps have a risk of lymph node metastases between 9 and 24%, but patients who are negative for certain histologic poor prognostic factors have the potential to be treated with polypectomy alone. Retrospective cohort of 216 malignant polyps from 213 patients identified through the British Columbia Colon Screening Program. Complete pathologic reporting (reporting of tumor grade, lymphovascular invasion, margin status, and tumor budding) was present in only 43% of patients.

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Background: The separation of benign from malignant mesothelial proliferations on effusion cytology can be difficult. Loss of methylthioadenosine phosphorylase (MTAP) by immunohistochemistry is an established marker of malignancy in mesothelial proliferations, but to the authors' knowledge largely has been applied only to biopsies. The current study was conducted to determine the usefulness of MTAP immunohistochemistry in the diagnosis of malignant mesothelioma in effusion cytology specimens.

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Context.—: The separation of reactive from malignant mesothelial proliferations is often a difficult morphologic problem. There is contradictory information in the literature on whether methylthioadenosine phosphorylase (MTAP) immunohistochemistry can be used for this purpose.

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Tumor budding, defined as single cells or clusters of less than five cells, is thought to be a histomorphologic marker of an aggressive tumor behavior mimicking the embryologic epithelial-mesenchymal transition, and has been well established in the past two decades as a poor prognostic factor in colorectal carcinoma. Slow uptake in routine reporting of this important pathologic prognostic feature was in part due to differing methods of assessment of budding reported in the literature, but has recently been clarified at a consensus conference on tumor budding in colorectal carcinoma. Tumor budding is also increasingly being reported as a useful pathologic prognostic feature in other gastrointestinal carcinomas, including esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma, gastric intestinal-type adenocarcinoma, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, and ampullary adenocarcinoma.

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SATB2 is part of the family of matrix attachment region-binding transcription factors, and has developmental roles in craniofacial, neural, and osteoblastic differentiation. Recently, SATB2 has been shown to be highly expressed in the epithelium of the lower gastrointestinal tract, with a relatively narrow expression profile in malignancies, including colorectal/appendiceal adenocarcinomas, tumors of osteoblastic differentiation, and renal/urothelial carcinomas. SATB2 has gained interest as a relatively specific marker of colorectal differentiation, with potential applications including determining origin of adenocarcinomas of unknown primary and distinguishing primary ovarian mucinous adenocarcinomas from colorectal metastases.

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The separation of sarcomatoid and desmoplastic malignant mesotheliomas from sarcomatoid carcinomas of the lung metastatic to the pleura may be difficult, since both types of tumor can be morphologically similar and are frequently positive only for pan-keratin. GATA binding protein 3 (GATA3) is most commonly used as an immunohistochemical marker of breast and urothelial carcinoma, but is also known to stain other types of tumors including some mesotheliomas. In this study we asked whether GATA3 stains could be used to distinguish sarcomatoid/desmoplastic malignant mesotheliomas (N=19) from sarcomatoid carcinomas of the lung (N=13).

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CD4(+)FOXP3(+) regulatory T cells are essential for immune tolerance, and murine studies suggest that their dysfunction can lead to type 1 diabetes (T1D). Human studies assessing regulatory T cell dysfunction in T1D have relied on analysis of FOXP3-expressing cells. Recently, distinct subsets of CD4(+)FOXP3(+) T cells with differing function were identified.

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Lipid rafts are membrane microdomains involved in many cellular functions, including transduction of cellular signals and cell entry by pathogens. Lipid rafts can be enriched biochemically by extraction in a nonionic detergent at low temperature, followed by floatation on a sucrose density gradient. Previous proteomic studies of such detergent-resistant membranes (DRMs) are in disagreement about the presence of mitochondrial proteins in raft components.

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