Shannon Brownlee
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 What that says to George Lundberg, a noted pathologist, ardent champion of the autopsy, and former editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is that imaging tests have not done much, on average, to improve doctors' powers of diagnosis. In a JAMA editorial accompanying a large autopsy study published in 1998, Lundberg wrote that the low-tech autopsy "trumps high-tech medicine in getting the right answer again and again, even during the 1990s and even at academic medical centers. |
David Steinman
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 PIN coexists with cancer in more than 85 percent of cases.
?Autopsy studies also demonstrate that development of high-grade PIN predates the development of clinically detectable cancer by five to ten years, consistent with the concept that high-grade PIN is a premalignant lesion.
?In a series of 249 autopsy cases, 77 percent of prostates with high-grade PIN harbored invasive adenocarcinoma, compared with only 24 percent without high-grade PIN.
?An autopsy study of European men found an association between high-grade PIN and carcinoma in the majority of cases. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Studies of autopsy results dating back to 1938 have consistently found high rates of diagnostic error; in 2 c to 40 percent of cases where an autopsy was performed, the patient died of an undiagnosed cause. In other words, the doctors had misdiagnosed the patient and were treating him for the wrong condition—giving him drugs for chronic heart failure, for instance, when he was in fact suffering from pneumonia. Incredibly, the rate of misdiagnosis has remained virtually unchanged since researchers began tracking autopsy results, back in 191 o. |
Devra Davis
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 By this he meant that the sheer number of reports of men with asbestosis who also had lung cancer at autopsy provided an overwhelming picture linking the disease with regular workplace contact. The main indicator of this tie, consistent in every country and in every report, was the high fraction of people dying with asbestosis who also had lung cancer at autopsy. Sometimes the cancer was distinctive: a tumor of the pleural sac, the diaphanous lining surrounding the lungs, called mesothelioma. Mesothelioma is believed to be exclusively associated with asbestos exposure. |
Abram Hoffer, PhD, MD, FRCP(C) and Dr. Jonathan Prousjy, DPHE, DSC, ND, FRSH
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 In one study, 13 autopsy subjects with aortic aneurysms and 13 autopsy control subjects were assessed for liver copper levels. The copper levels of the autopsy subjects were only 26% of the control subjects. Since copper is necessary for the proper cross-linking of collagen and elastin, deficiency of this mineral may cause weakened aortic tissue and greater susceptibility to aneurysms. Copper is also a necessary cofactor in the conversion of T4 to the more potent thyroid hormone known as T3 or triiodothyronine. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Incredibly, the rate of misdiagnosis has remained virtually unchanged since researchers began tracking autopsy results, back in 191 o.
What that says to George Lundberg, a noted pathologist, ardent champion of the autopsy, and former editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is that imaging tests have not done much, on average, to improve doctors' powers of diagnosis. |
David Steinman
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| In a series of 249 autopsy cases, 77 percent of prostates with high-grade PIN harbored invasive adenocarcinoma, compared with only 24 percent without high-grade PIN.
?An autopsy study of European men found an association between high-grade PIN and carcinoma in the majority of cases.
For more than five years, Katz, a board-certified urologist and skilled surgeon who received his medical training at New York Medical College, has been the director of the Center for Holistic Urology at New York's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 At stake, in addition to one's life, are the definitions of normal versus pathological. autopsy studies indicate that most older men, and 30% of younger men (age 30-49) have asymptomatic prostate cancer. One study estimated that 29-44% of cancers detected by PSA were "over-diagnosed" because they would otherwise have been detected only at autopsy.41 Odd to say, but certain malignancies may be a part of one's ordinary (normal?) life. |
Devra Davis
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| At the end of the twenty-five years they must submit to an operation or an autopsy to determine the result of the experiment.11
Graham did not realize that the preposterous experiment he had spoofed was already under way with asbestos workers. They were not confined in air-conditioned quarters but instead allowed to return to their families with deadly, invisible dust on their clothes after work. |
| Other than this single autopsy on a poisoned toddler, Hueper and Kehoe seemingly had little direct contact. When they finally connected, it was not as scientific collaborators but as shadowboxing adversaries in legal wranglings.
Behind the scenes the two men were joined at the hip. In 1960, as part of his work on a legal matter involving an injured worker, Hueper learned that Kehoe had been reviewing his work for years, conducting secret studies on matters Hueper had been ordered not to pursue. |
| Another matter on which we can only speculate regards the circumstances that led Wilhelm Hueper to contribute information on the swollen, bloody brain of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl on whom Kehoe was asked to perform an autopsy in 1936. It was not uncommon for pathologists to pack up and ship various body parts to others for examination. From Hueper's letter of referral for this case, we learn that the Haskell toxicology lab had asked Kehoe on May 14, 1936, to review the collected tissues that had originally been examined at the
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. |
Thomson Healthcare, Inc.
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 Japanese-American men, originally enrolled in the Honolulu Heart Program (HHP) and the Honolulu-Asia Aging Study (HAAS), were assessed for cognitive changes (n=3734) and brain atrophy (neuro-image: n=574; autopsy: n=290) after a review of their dietary habits from 1965 to 1967 and 1971 to 1974. Men with the highest tofu consumption (2 or more servings a week) were more likely to develop cognitive impairment than those with low or no tofu consumption (p<0.05). Low brain weight and enlargement of ventricles were also associated with higher tofu consumption. |
Bottom Line Health
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| When researchers compared autopsy results with earlier blood samples, they found that nuns who had higher blood levels of folate were less likely to show signs of the brain atrophy associated with Alzheimer's.
Folate (the supplemental form is called folic acid) suppresses the amino acid homocysteine. Excessive homocysteine levels promote the development of atherosclerotic plaques in brain and heart arteries. These plaques increase the risk of stroke and heart attack. Homocysteine is also thought to damage neurons and increase brain atrophy in Alzheimer's patients. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Yet studies of the effectiveness of imaging, including autopsy studies, have shown that the technology is improving care in only tiny increments, even as utilization and costs are rising at meteoric rates. A study performed for the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, for example, found that patients suffering from heart attacks, hip fractures, and colon cancer did not benefit from more imaging tests.
To make matters worse, simply tracking the spiraling bills we're paying for all that imaging fails to capture its true cost. |
Bill Sardi
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 In Vivo 8: 439-443, 1994]
There are four ways to find latent cancer:
1 screening via PSA testing
2 biopsy
3 surgical entry
I and evidence on the autopsy table
It is said that 80% of men develop prostate cancer by age 80. [Prostate Cancer: Biology, Diagnosis, Pathology, Staging, and Natural History, WebMD, March 10, 2005] Genetic instability leads to abnormal cell growth (neoplasia) and finally to full blown cancer. If so many older men harbor tumor cells in their prostate, what value is there to screening? |
Shannon Brownlee
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| In the case of prostate cancer, the vast majority of tumors sit around for years, causing few, if any, symptoms, and autopsy studies have shown that far more men die with prostate cancer than of it. Even among men who have been diagnosed with the disease, more than 90 percent will live fifteen more years even if they are never treated. On the flip side, many dangerous prostate cancers can't be cured with current treatments, no matter how early they're caught. Unfortunately, radiologists and pathologists can't tell with much certainty how aggressive a particular tumor is going to be. |
| Actually, the autopsy doesn't so much trump high-tech medicine as it reveals some of its limitations. A more-recent paper, published by a group of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, in 2003, looked at fifty-three separate studies of autopsies performed since the 1960s, the period of time that spans the meteoric rise in the use of imaging tests. The authors found only a tiny drop in the rate of misdiagnosis. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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 Hand washing is still the single most powerful way to prevent the spread of communicable disease, but this was not discovered until 1847, when Ignaz Semmelweis, a young Viennese doctor in an obstetrics ward, observed that midwives who washed their hands had lower mortality rates among their patients than did doctors, who often went from autopsy room to delivery ward without so much as a hand wipe.
Future advances in health will likely come more from changes in lifestyle, diet, and exercise than from medications. |
Ann N. Martin
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 Best cites 1989 autopsy studies done at the University of Pittsburgh and Yale University that show respectively that 5.5 percent and 13 percenr of Alzheimer patients actually were victims of CJD.4
In a similar survey of neuropathologists it was found that from 2 percent to 12 percent of all dementias in humans were actually CJD. This survey finding was corroborated by a 1989 University of Pennsylvania study by Elias E. Manuelidis, MD, and Laura Manuelidis, MD, which identified that 5 percent of misdiagnosed dementia patients were actually dying from CJD. |
Richard Bartlett
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 Just as we can be convinced that our reality and our diagnosis are correct (even though according to statistics compiled at the Mayo
Clinic, almost 50 percent of its diagnoses were proven on autopsy to be wrong, dead wrong!), we could choose to be equally convinced of the insubstantiality of the problem. I say this not to make light of people's suffering, but to point out that at another, equally real level of reality, the problem as well as the possible solution is light! Following the silly but sage advice of my "guides," I imagined it "not there," and it wasn't. |
Thomson Healthcare, Inc.
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| Saito T; Tsuboi Y; Fujisawa G et al. An autopsy case of licorice-induced hypokalemic rhabdomyolysis associated with acute renal failure: special reference to profound calcium deposition in skeletal and cardiac muscle. Nippon Jinzo Gakkai Shi Nov;36(ll):1308-14. 1994.
Seelen MA; de Meijer PH; Braun J et al. Hypertension caused by licorice consumption. Ned Tijdschr Geneeskd Dec 28;140(52):2632-5. 1996.
Segal R et al., J Pharm Sci 74 (1):79. 1985.
Shibata S. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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 Mter euthanizing the rats, the researchers did the equivalent of a rodent autopsy and took photos of their inner abdominal areas. The rats that ate only regular rat chow had huge amounts of white abdominal fat around their middle, while the CLA rats had almost none. It was dramatic, and I still remember the pictures. The question, of course, was does CLA do the same for people?
There's been a lot of research on CLA since then, and the results show it has a lot of potential. |
Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe
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 Kelley, author of the Oxford Dictionary of the Popes, tells us that these allegations were disproved by the medical autopsy,25 there is an Italian saying si non e vero, e ben trovato ("even if it's not true, it's a good one").
Just about at the other end of the "hierarchy-vs-Enlightenment" scale from papal Rome was Venice, the Italian city most open to intellectual, artistic, and commercial influences from the rest of Europe and the world, but now in deep economic decline. |
Dr. Abram Hoffer, MD, FRCP (C) and Dr. Harold D. Foster, PhD
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 However, at autopsy, the animals showed elevated fatty acid in the liver.
In 1950, a deficiency of methyl groups was known to cause fatty livers. Niacin and niacinamide are methyl acceptors. It made sense, therefore, to consider the possibility that too much vitamin B-3 caused fatty acid livers by producing a methyl deficiency syndrome. Some experiments suggested this was so, but when these experiments were repeated by Professor R. Altschul of the University of Saskatchewan, the results did not confirm these findings. |
Michael Friedman, ND
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 As quoted by Ghent et al, in 1928 an autopsy series reported a 3% incidence of FDB, whereas in a 1973 autopsy report, the incidence of FDB increased markedly to 89%.19 Is it possible that the very low 3% incidence of FDB reported in the pre-RDA early 1900s was due to the widespread use of the Lugol solution available then from local apothecaries; and the recently reported 89% incidence of FDB is due to a trend of decreasing I consumption, with such decreased levels still within RDA limits for I, therefore giving a false sense of I sufficiency. 2
The American physician H.S. |
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D.
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 No autopsy was ever performed, but because of the vomiting and bleeding, which are not associated with heart disease, I suspect he died of Mallory-Weiss syndrome, in which a gastric artery is eroded by acid and retching. The third was a retired truck driver, who fell into a terrible depression. At the time of his death, he was living in a facility where he couldn't eat safely, and little by little, his health deteriorated. |
| The New England Journal of Medicine published the results of his autopsy, noting an "absolutely remarkable" absence of calcification and fatty deposits in Pritikin's coronary arteries. Those blood vessels, the medical examiner declared, were like those of a teenager.1
Hans Diehl, who studied with Nathan Pritikin, has made healthier lifestyles his own lifelong cause. His Coronary Health Improvement Program—CHIP—trains entire communities in how to change their bad nutrition habits. |
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