Welcome to Pathology Student!
My name is Kristine Krafts, MD, and I love teaching pathology.
If you’re looking for straightforward answers to your pathology questions,
you’ve come to the right place!
Desmoid tumor: benign but nasty
Desmoid tumor, also called deep-seated fibromatosis, is a benign tumor that is nonetheless a nasty beast. It is composed of fibroblasts, and it often presents as a large, infiltrative masses. Desmoid tumors may occur in patients with familial adenomatous polyposis...
Acute leukemia vs. CML blast crisis
Q. I'd like to know how to differentiate between acute leukemia and blast crisis of CML. A. Great question! To diagnose blast crisis (or blast phase) in chronic myeloid leukemia, you need to have one of the following: More than 20% blasts in the blood or bone marrow...
How to tell apart aplastic anemia and pancytopenia
Q. How do you tell apart aplastic anemia and pancytopenia? A. This is an interesting question, because we're comparing a distinct disease (aplastic anemia) with a generalized blood finding (pancytopenia). Pancytopenia means that all of the cell lines (white cells, red...
Mastocytosis
Mastocytosis is actually a spectrum of rare disorders, all of which are characterized by - not surprisingly - an increase in mast cells. Most patients have disease that is localized to the skin, but about 10% of patients have systemic involvement. There is a...
A quick summary of the 6 types of necrosis
Q. I can't seem to get the different types of necrosis straight (liquefactive, fibrinoid, etc.). Any help? A. There are basically six distinct patterns of necrosis. It's important to know about these, because they can give you a clue as to why the tissue died. We'll...
Myelodysplasia: not quite leukemia
Myelodysplasia (MDS) is often thought of as "pre-leukemia." Which is kind of misleading, because only some cases of MDS go on to become leukemia; others stay the same and never progress. In MDS, there is some sort of abnormality in a myeloid stem cell. If you look at...
Henoch-Schonlein purpura: the disease you never really learned about
Sometimes in pathology, you hear the name of a disease over and over, but somehow you never really learn about it. So it was for me with Henoch-Schonlein purpura. I knew that some vasculitides resembled the lesions of Henoch-Schonlein purpura, and I knew it had...
Does “differentiated” mean it looks different?
Q. A question: why do you call a tumor "well-differentiated" when actually it is the LEAST different from the tissue of origin? Shouldn't it be "low differentiated?" A. That's a great question. So many times in pathology we use terms without explaining them - you're...
Aplastic anemia
Aplastic anemia falls into the category of "anemias-in-which-the-cells-don't-look-weird" category. Anemias in this category can sometimes be difficult to diagnose (for example, in anemia of chronic disease, the cells are of normal size and shape...so it's dang hard to...