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!
Tumor cell differentiation
Here's a good question that gets at a concept you should understand: tumor cell differentiation. Q. I'm doing a clinical research project, and I'm supposed to record the differentiation of resected tumors per the pathology reports. A specific report says, " cell...
HIT vs. HAT
Here's a good question about two entities that sound the same (but aren't). Q. What is the difference between heparin associated thrombocytopenia (HAT) and heparin induced thrombocytopenia (HIT)? A. Heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) is defined as a decrease in...
Hereditary elliptocytosis
Here's a disorder that's very similar to hereditary spherocytosis: hereditary elliptocytosis. Patients with this disorder have numerous elliptocytes (as the name says) rather than spherocytes - but many of the features of the two diseases are similar. Hereditary...
Glucose 6 phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency
Next in our little series on hereditary hemolytic anemias is glucose 6 phosphate dehydrogenase (or G6PD) deficiency. Before we get into G6PD deficiency, we need to discuss just what this G6PD enzyme does. If you can close your eyes and try to think back to...
Hereditary spherocytosis
Having looked at the causes of hemolytic anemia in a general way (we grouped them into hereditary and acquired groups, and defined the general clinical characteristics of each), let's take a closer look at the specific kinds of hemolytic anemia. We'll discuss the...
Hematology clinical vignette
Here's a nice boards - type question that requires you to put together some clinical and laboratory data to form a diagnosis, and then describe what the blood smear would look like. A previously-healthy 32-year-old woman presents with recurrent headaches. She develops...
What kinds of hemolytic anemias are there?
We've been talking a lot about hemolytic anemias - we talked about how to figure out if your patient has a hemolytic anemia, and we talked about the DAT as a test that you would do to determine whether your patient's hemolytic anemia falls into the immune category...
How do you know if an anemia is hemolytic?
Okay, we've talked a lot about the DAT, and how it's used to determine whether your patient's hemolytic anemia is due to immune causes (warm or cold autoimmune hemolytic anemia). But how do you know if your patient's anemia is a hemolytic one in the first place? Well,...
Cold autoimmune hemolytic anemia
We talked recently about the direct antiglobulin test (DAT) which is a test used to find out whether a hemolytic anemia is immune-related or not. And we talked even more recently about the immune hemolytic anemias, starting off with warm autoimmune hemolytic anemia....