There are several reasons why patients who present with mesothelioma are often misdiagnosed. One of the biggest ones is that mesothelioma is an “orphan disease,” meaning it only affects a small percentage of the general population. According to the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation, “the numbers of newly affected individuals in the United States have been reported to be between 2,500 and 3,000 every year”. As a result, doctors aren’t as familiar with the disease as they are with other conditions like diabetes, breast cancer or heart disease.
Symptoms of the disease, such as chest pain, difficulty breathing and sudden weight loss, are another reason why it is so difficult to diagnose. According to Dr. Lee Krug, a thoracic oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Director of the Mesothelioma Program at that institution, and a member of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Guidelines Panel, “Diagnosing mesothelioma is often difficult, because the symptoms are similar to those of a number of other conditions. In addition, a physician’s initial evaluation of a patient may reveal pleural effusion (accumulation of fluid between the layers of tissue that line the lungs and chest cavity), but it can often be missed on pleural fluid cytology (examination of the cells of the fluid under a microscope).” His comments appeared in a NCCN press release dated March 13, 2010.
In many cases, diagnosis is further complicated by the fact that the pathologist has only a very small amount of biopsied tissue available for histological evaluation. This type of assessment uses a microscope evaluation of the tissue to determine if it is cancerous. If it is, then tests are performed to determine the type of cancer it is.
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