Lecture - Cancer (Nomenclature) Flashcards
What is the purpose of classification?
Prognosis:
- What does this mean?
- What factors affect a person’s prognosis?
- What do survival rates mean?
- Can we or can’t we be absolutely certain about the outcome for a particular patient?
First, what do these terms mean in your own words - as if you were describing them to someone
- Cancer
- Tumor
- Mass
- Oncology
Neoplasia
- What is this a process of?
- But also…..(2)
- Whilst you’re here, how does neoplasia differ from hyperplasia, hypertrophy and metaplasia? Define these with examples
Dysplasia
- What does this mean? It may lead to what?
- What are the features of dysplasia that you see in tissues?
Anaplasia
- What does this mean?
- What do anaplastic nuclei look like?
- what may they produce?
Slide 11: Do cancer cells go backwards in terms of differentiation?
No, they just produce a tumor that’s only as differentiated as the initial cell - it won’t go back to being a stem cell etc
Metastasis:
- What does this mean?
- It is an auto-transplantation phenomenon, what does that mean?
What is the difference between ‘In situ” and “invasive carcinoma”?
Fill in the table
AND THEN TELL ME THE FOUR EXCEPTIONS that she mentioned

What are the four things used to classify tumors?
Behavioural, histogentic, grade and stage
Benign neoplasms:
- How are they different in their growth from malignant tumors?
- Do they invade the surrounding tissues?
- how does it expand? - Will it metastasize?
- Does it generally produce harm?
- How can these tumors produce significant morbidy or mortality?
- What is the difference between neoplasm and tumor?
Neoplasm is an abnormal growth of tissue, which if it forms a mass, is commonly referred to as a tumor. This abnormal growth (neoplasia) usually but not always forms a mass.
Pituitary adenoma
- You get loss of what?
- Local _____ growth
- Space ______
- What causes the necrosis?
- ______ of local structures
- Is it a benign or malignant neoplasm?
Benign
What does a microscopic fibroadenoma look like and what is part of it?
What does it look like grossly in the breast?
Is it a benign or malignant neoplasm?
Benign
Malignant neoplasms
- Possess a greater degree of what?
- Does it expand or invade the local tissues?
- Does it matastasize?
- Can it be treated?
- Can you die from this?
Invasive carcinoma
- Is it benign or malignant?
- What does it look like?
- Looking at the photo, is it anaplastic or dysplastic?
Breast carcinoma
- What does it look like?
- Is it benign or malignant?
- What are the local effects on the breast?
What does peau D’orange mean?
- What does a uterus with a leiomyoma look like?
- Is it benign or malignant?
- What does a leiomyosarcoma look like grossly and histologically?
- Does a leiomya turn into this or?
Slide 30 has a good summary slide for leiomyaoma vs leiomyosarcoma
GI tract cancers
- Go look at slide 31 and for each of the images on the right side tell me about
- how does it range in terms of differentiation?
Fill in this table

I feel like you do need to know the different types of tumor within the breast - the are classified by histogentic type - what are the 6? And the additional 7th
Out of these 6, 2 each under “worse prognosis”, “intermediate prognosis” and “favourable prognosis” - tell me them
How is immunohistochemistry used to identify the cancer cells?
They have oestrogen receptors
You know how you had the histogenic classifications of breat tumors? Alright, now do the same for bronchogenic carcinomas - there are 5 typs