The spectrum of neuroendocrine neoplasia: a practical approach to diagnosis, classification and therapy

Abstract

Neuroendocrine neoplasms are ubiquitous, and they involve every organ system in the human body. These are lesions that need to be considered in the differential diagnosis of any wellformed glandular or poorly differentiated solid tumors seen in everyday practice. In recent years there also have been major developments in the elucidation of molecular mechanisms and newly available antibodies for the diagnosis of these tumors. This new tome from Springer nature is timely, and it offers an encyclopedic coverage of this group of diverse tumors. My review is based on the e-book version which is available for purchase and download from www.springer.com website. The book is divided into 19 chapters, and it has 26 authors including the 3 editors, most of them pathologists but also several endocrinologists, radiologists, and oncologists. The first three chapters of the book deal with general background information about neuroendocrine neoplasms including historical aspects such as Goliath suffering from possible gigantism and the Egyptian New Kingdom pharaoh Akhenaten. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the clinical and radiological diagnosis of neuroendocrine neoplasms respectively, followed by the bulk of the book (Chapters 4–15) which discusses neuroendocrine neoplasm in the different organ systems. The final four chapters deal with special circumstances such as unknown metastatic neuroendocrine carcinomas, inherited syndromes, cytologic diagnosis of neuroendocrine tumors and treatment aspects of these tumors. In the e-book, there are links to all the chapters and the references when available, making for easy navigation. The book is beautifully illustrated with numerous photomicrographs, and the tables and graphs are comprehensive, detailed and easy to read. In general, this is a great up-to-date reference book for neuroendocrine neoplasia, and it is one of the best ones available right now in the market for most anatomic pathology laboratories dealing with this common everyday neoplasm.