How to Read Your Pathology Report: Cutting Through the Medical Jargon

This medical report explains the results of your lab tests, and it gives a description of your cells and how they looked under a microscope. It's written by a pathologist a doctor who diagnoses cancer.

To rewind a bit and give you some context, the pathologist uses a sample of tissue that your doctor removed during a biopsy to write this report. Your doctor might have used a needle to pull out just a sample of cells, or taken out an entire lymph node to test for cancer.

The pathologist looks at those cells under a microscope to find out whether they are cancerous or benign. The cells are also stained to discover more about the features of the cancer such as its genetic makeup, and whether it is likely to spread quickly or slowly.

"When I look at the pathology report, I’m looking to see what the description of the cells were and the various stains are that all come together to come to a specific diagnosis," Dr. Piro says.

How to Read Your Pathology Report

Pathology reports are written by doctors, for doctors. So don't be surprised if you're confused by the amount of medical jargon staring at you from the page. Ask your oncologist or nurse to help decipher it for you.

Here are a few of the terms you can expect to see on your report, and what they mean:

Specimen: The origin of the tissue sample.

Procedure: How the tissue sample was taken.

Clinical history: Your medical history leading up to the biopsy.

Gross description: How your sample looks with the naked eye.

Microscopic description: What the cells look like under the microscope, and how they compare to normal cells.

Diagnosis: Your type of cancer and its grade how abnormal the cells look under a microscope, and how likely the cancer will be to grow and spread.

What's Your Type?

From the pathology report, your doctor will learn what type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma you have. "It is that specific type of lymphoma that is going to guide the therapy," according to Dr. Piro. "Some lymphomas are so low-grade that you don’t even have to treat them. You can just observe them, and as long as they don’t progress, you can coexist with that lymphoma." Marginal zone lymphomas, follicular lymphoma, and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL)/small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL) are examples of slow-growing cancers.

Other lymphomas are so aggressive that if you don’t treat them, they will "gallop along in the body," Dr. Piro tells SurvivorNet. Cancers such as diffuse large B-cell lymphoma can spread quickly enough to become life-threatening if you don't get them taken care of right away. "You need to intervene aggressively with aggressive treatment." However, he adds that many of the faster-growing lymphomas are curable with the right therapy.

"There’s such a different approach, all the way from observation to minimal treatment to aggressive treatment. All of that is guided by the pathology report," Dr. Piro says. "That is really what begins the process and informs us of everything else that’s to follow."

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