Skin Biopsy
What is Skin Biopsy for mole removal?
Skin biopsy is a technique whereby a skin lesion is removed from the mole and sent to a pathologist to render a microscopic diagnosis. It is usually done under local anesthetic in a physician’s office, and results are often available in 4 to 10 days. It is commonly performed by dermatologists. Skin biopsies are also done before mole removals to test whether a atypical mole is malignant.
The problem with skin biopsy is that when it is performed incorrectly, and without appropriate clinical information, a pathologist’s interpretation of a skin biopsy can be severely limited.
One of the myths about melanoma is that a skin biopsy will stir up the melanoma cells and cause them to infiltrate the body. No evidence indicates that this will happen. The concern with any biopsy technique other than an excisional one is that the piece of skin cut will not include all of the lesion. This may make it difficult to know the extent to which melanoma has penetrated the skin, and consequently to determine its stage accurately.
Types of Skin Biopsy
There are four main types of skin biopsies: shave biopsy, punch biopsy and fine needle aspirate. The choice of the different skin biopsies is dependent on the suspected diagnosis of the skin lesion. Like most biopsies, patient consent and anesthesia are prerequisites.
A pathology report is highly dependent on the quality of the biopsy that is submitted. It is not unusual to miss the diagnosis of a skin tumor or a skin biopsy due to a poorly performed or inappropriately performed skin biopsy. Thus, I would normally recommend patients to go to for a more certified and experienced dermatologist even if his service is slightly more expensive.
Shave biopsy
This is done with either a small scalpel blade or a curved razor blade. This technique is very much user skill dependent, as some surgeons can remove a small fragment of mole with minimal blemish using any one of the above tools, while others have great difficulty securing the devices. Ideally, the razor will shave only a small fragment of a protruding mole and cause minimal damages. Most surgeon who try to the stop the bleeding with electrocautery alone after a small fragment of the mole is removed.
Punch biopsy
This is method of skin biopsy for mole removal is done with a round shaped knife ranging in size from 1mm to 8 mm. Some punch biopsies are shaped like an ellipse, although one can accomplish the same desired shape with a standard scalpel. The 1 mm and 1.5 mm punch are ideal for wierd positioning of moles which is difficult to accomplish with the shave method.
Minimal bleeding is noted with the 1 mm punch, and often the wound is left to heal without stitching for the smaller punch biopsies. Disadvantage of the 1 mm punch is that the tissue obtained is almost impossible to see at times due to small size, and the 1.5 mm biopsy is preferred in most cases.
Fine Needle Aspirate
Fine needle aspiration skin biopsy is done with the rapid stabbing motion of the hand guiding a needle tipped syringe and the rapid sucking motion applied to the syringe. This method is used to diagnose mole cells deep in the skin. The cellular aspirate is mounted on a glass slide and immediate diagnosis of the mole can be made with proper staining or submitted to a laboratory for final diagnosis.
A fine needle aspirate can be done with simply a large bore needle and a small syringe (1 cc) that can generate rapid changes in suction pressure. Both the surgeon and the pathologist must be familiar with the method of procuring, fixing, and reading of the slide.
Most methods used by dematologist to remove mole such as mole removal surgery, laser mole removal and cryosurgery makes use of skin biopsy first to determine the nature of a the mole. This is because making use of wrong methods to removing moles can lead to fatal results. Therefore, its is normally reccommended that people go for a skin biopsy before using home remedies such as mole removal cream or natural remedies to tackle removing of moles.
Incoming search terms:
- mole removal punch biopsy
- mole removal biopsy results
- punch biopsy mole removal
- consent for mole removal form
- mole removal with blade
- what is punch to remove moles
- punch biopsy for atypical mole
- pathology results of mole removal termonolgy
- pathology results after mole removal
- pathology on mole removal