Placenta Diagnostic Pathology Handbook

Written for the pathologist who must sign out a placenta today without a perinatal fellowship behind them, this reference carries the 2016 Amsterdam consensus from its criteria into the report that an obstetric team, a neonatologist, and a family can actually use. It builds from the two-wave spiral artery remodeling and villous angiogenesis that set every diagnostic baseline, through the four major injury patterns, and into the trophoblastic, structural, and medicolegal territory where placental practice is most exposed. Gross photography, three-tier photomicrographs, staging ladders, and sectioning maps sit alongside explicit numeric thresholds and native reference tables — with no citation apparatus interrupting the clinical prose.
What This Book Puts on Your Cutting Board
• The Perinatal Correlation Map— a repeating five-slot structure that names the lesion constellation, states its diagnostic threshold, excludes the mimics, and closes on the one clinical sentence the report should carry, consolidated into a back-of-book navigator indexed by requisition indication.
• Maternal and fetal vascular malperfusion — accelerated maturation, distal villous hypoplasia, decidual arteriopathy, and avascular villus counts applied at the thresholds that make them reportable.
• Chorioamnionitis staging and grading — maternal and fetal inflammatory responses scored to stage and grade, with funisitis read as evidence of duration.
• Stillbirth and the demise interval — placental change sequenced against time since death, and the corroboration required before any cord accident is named.
• Neonatal encephalopathy and causation — calibrated language, acute-versus-chronic markers, and the consensus criteria that place placental findings in their real evidentiary position.
• Molar gestation and trophoblastic tumors — p57 with its mandatory internal control, genotyping where p57 cannot decide, and Ki-67 separating benign intermediate trophoblast from its malignant counterparts.
• Gross protocol and synoptic templates — a numbered dissection sequence, the minimum block set, and fillable reporting fields for singleton and multiple gestation.
Open it before the next specimen — because the report you write today is the one that gets read back years from now.