UPDATE - Issue 37 - Summer 2009
Donald Gleason
Most men with prostate cancer know their Gleason score, a measure of malignancy. The scoring system was invented by Donald Gleason who has died aged 88. He proposed the system in 1962 as a young and unknown head of pathology at the Minneapolis Veterans Association medical centre.
Pathologists tend to think in pictures, and quickly grasped his graphic approach. ‘The grading system,’ he wrote, ‘spread rapidly through the urological/pathological world and many reports have appeared, confirming the results.’ Gleason's drawings were reproduced repeatedly.
It was not until 1987, that the Gleason grading system became standardized and applied uniformly in all publications on prostate cancer. The system persists to this day.
After his distinguished medical career, Donald Gleason spent his last 20 years sailing, baking bread and playing bridge. He died of heart failure, and is survived by his wife of 62 years, Nancy, and three daughters.
The Gleason grading system explained
The tissue samples taken from a prostate biopsy are examined under a microscope. Grades of one (low grade) to five (high grade) are assigned to the two most common patterns of cancer seen under the microscope. These are:
1) How the cells look (on a scale of 1 to 5).
2) How the cells are arranged (on a scale of 1 to 5).
These two numbers are then combined to give a Gleason Grade score of 2-10. Low grades, 2 to 4 are correlated with slow growth rate cancers. The cells look most like normal prostate cells and are well differentiated. High grade cancers (Gleason 8 to 10) are quick to spread, have cells that look least like normal cells and are poorly differentiated. Intermediate grade cancers may behave like low or high grade cancers.