The quality of care for treatment of early stage breast carcinoma: is it consistent with national guidelines?
In the states studied, practice appears to be consistent with the results of national consensus conferences and clinical trials regarding the treatment of early stage breast carcinoma. For practices demonstrated to be associated definitively with better outcomes (for example, chemotherapy for premenopausal women with positive lymph nodes) or to be important with respect to prognosis (axillary lymph node dissection) high rates of compliance were observed.
In patients with phaeochromocytoma, plasma free metanephrines displayed superior diagnostic sensitivity and specificity compared with other biochemical markers of catecholamine output and metabolism.