Dermatopathologists tend to render "more severe diagnoses for skin biopsy cases of melanocytic lesions" more often than general pathologists, results from an exploratory study showed.
The findings "could in part play a role in the rising incidence of early-stage melanoma with low risk of progression or patient morbidity, thereby contributing to increasing rates of overdiagnosis," researchers led by co–senior authors Joann G. Elmore, MD, MPH, of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Raymond L. Barnhill, MD, MBA, of the Institut Curie, Paris, wrote in their study, published online in JAMA Dermatology.
To investigate the characteristics associated with rendering higher-grade diagnoses, including invasive melanoma, the researchers drew from two national data sets: the Melanoma Pathology (M-Path) study, conducted from July 2013 to May 2016, and the Reducing Errors in Melanocytic Interpretations (REMI) study, conducted from August 2018 to March 2021. In both studies, pathologists who interpreted melanocytic lesions in their clinical practices interpreted study cases in glass slide format. For the current study, researchers used logistic regression to examine the association of pathologist characteristics with diagnosis of a study case as higher grade (including severely dysplastic and melanoma in situ) vs. lower grade (including mild to moderately dysplastic nevi) and diagnosis of invasive melanoma vs.
