Why Is it Difficult to Diagnose Mesothelioma?
Thoracic Surgeon, Dr. Jeffery Velotta, shares the difficulties around a mesothelioma diagnosis.
[MUSIC PLAYING] The diagnosis of mesothelioma is very difficult because, specifically, you need tissue. And I think that's the hardest part that for us to try to let clinicians and patients know that it's not the fluid. They often come in because of the fluid. But the fluid, the majority of the time, 70%, 80% of the time, will not tell you if you have mesothelioma or not. There's just not enough cells in the fluid. And so you actually need tissue. And so when you get the tissue, you actually have to have the adequate amount of tissue. And so that means a surgical biopsy, which is done through a thoracoscopy, or a little small camera that goes in between the ribs. And once the pathologist gets adequate tissue, mesothelioma can look like a lot of other cancers, like including lung cancer. And so then they do special stains in immunohistochemistry. So it's actually antibodies that test for certain mesothelioma cell factors that will be expressed. And so doing all that, even then, it's difficult. So say we think it's mesothelioma, we'll actually always send it out for a second referral to make sure that indeed it is mesothelioma. And then after you get the world's expert, if they agree with that, then we come back and tell the patient it's mesothelioma. So the issue is really it can take up to-- which is why I recommend that all patients undergo biopsy as soon as possible and not wait, because it can take up to four weeks to get a diagnosis back of mesothelioma versus if you get for lung cancer, per se. That can take two days-- or more common cancers, like colon cancer. So with mesothelioma, just getting the diagnosis can be one of the hardest parts. [MUSIC PLAYING]
