biopsy

During those two weeks, a bone marrow biopsy was done.

Imagine trying to cure a muscular disease where you can't even biopsy the muscle of your patients!

I am very closely acquainted with a person who was found to have this infection by culture of a biopsy sample during the 1980s.

A bone marrow biopsy that includes cutting a hole in the hip bone, and getting to center of the bone and extracting a sample of the sponge like tissue.

For example, if your study requires a muscle biopsy instead of a blood test, your n is going to be lower because muscle biopsies are a tough sell to patients.

So get the biopsy pathology report, the pathology report from the mastectomy, etc.

I don't know what we charge for a routine biopsy, but for an MRI guided one with vacuum assistance - vasty more complicated, expensive and time consuming - we charge about $2000USD.

The examination finding that prompted the biopsy was persistent cough and general fatigue accompanied by an abnormal chest X-ray.

Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.

The information about the disease came in pieces: first all I knew was that there was a lump; then came the ultrasound, the CT scan, then biopsy of the testicle, then a second surgery to sample lymph nodes to which the cancer might have spread.

Unproven as a technique, very expensive, very low resolution when whole body imaging is performed, will miss important stuff, and generate unnecessary biopsy procedures.

On any given day I read xrays, CT scans, MRIs, ultrasounds, PET scans, mammograms, nuclear medicine studies, or live flouroscopic studies, and using CT or ultrasound guidance I can get a needle into just about any part of your body to take a biopsy.

\n\n -- Phase 0 = seek to determine if the drug \n is doing biochemically what it is expected \n to do based on preclinical studies, usually \n by taking a biopsy and doing chemical tests.\n \n -- Phase 1 "are designed to determine two things: \n dose and dose-limiting side effects" ... \n not efficacy of the drug.\n\n - all 5 were treated differently and in \n combination with other treatments.

As if thats not bad enough, it would appear that tumors are a mosaic of groups of many different tumor cell types that develop through branching evolution such that metastases can be very different from the primary tumor and even different regions of the primary tumor can be very different from each other, so much so that finding a favorable prognosis signature on a core biopsy means only that that one area biopsied has that gene signature.