Toxicologic Pathology

[on-hold music] Hello, and welcome to the podcast for the Journal of Toxicologic Pathology.

I'm Tracy, and today I will be interviewing Jeff Wolff about his recent manuscript titled Absolute versus Relative Approaches to Severity Scoring of Histopathologic Findings in Preclinical Toxicology Studies: What's the Difference and How, When, and Why This Matters.

And that was authored by Jeffrey Wolff and Kathleen Funk.

Um, so then one of the points that you made in the introduction is that the, the relative merits of relative, um, versus absolute, uh, histologic scoring methods has not really been covered in the literature.

Why do you think that that is?

Well, I kind of feel as if toxicologic pathology has always been a very pragmatic, results-oriented discipline, and as a consequence, we pathologists don't tend to devote a great deal of time to philosophical self-reflection.

If we think of the field of toxicologic pathology as having begun ur- in earnest in the early 1970s, that means that it's over fifty years old, and yet papers are still being generated that describe best practices for severity scoring, determination of adversity, how to perform peer reviews, and other major dec-decision-making processes that are fundamental to what we do.

Aside from basic anatomic and clinical pathology, much of what we learn in this specialized field seems to be derived from on-the-job training, and I suspect that the difference between absolute versus relative scoring is an understanding that most pathologists develop intuitively with experience.