Pathologists fear one in five breast cancer hormone tests wrong.(International news)(Brief article)

* Pathologists fear one in five breast cancer hormone tests wrong. Hundreds of women in Quebec with breast cancer may have been prescribed the wrong treatment because of faulty pathology tests, a CBC News investigation has found. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the issue surfaced recently, as Eastern Health's pathology lab turned over inaccurate hormone-receptor tests to almost 400 patients over an eight-year period. More than 100 women died. Worried that the same problem could occur in Quebec, the province's pathology association took 15 breast cancer tissue samples, had them tested by a reliable lab, and then sent the samples to labs across the province, asking them to re-test for hormone receptors. The results showed 15% to 20% of the hormone-receptor tests got the wrong result, and 30% of tests looking for the HER2 protein were wrong.

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