As a dental patient, you might want to pay close attention to what your dentist says -- if anything at all -- about the oral lesion in your mouth that's been bothering you lately.

A study of nearly 1,000 tissue specimens from lesions submitted to a university pathology department for examination reveals that dentists -- across a wide spectrum of specialties -- are not very good at diagnosing what they see. In fact, misdiagnosis is all too commonly observed by lab technicians reviewing biopsy specimens sent to them by dentists.

Especially general dentists. In fact, of the 976 specimens submitted to the oral pathology department at Virginia Commonwealth University over a recent one-year period, general dentists misidentified what they submitted nearly 46 percent of the time.

The error rate turns out to be not much better for oral surgeons -- 43 percent -- or periodontists, who misdiagnosed their submissions more than 41 percent of the time.

Lead study researcher Daniel M. Laskin, DDS, says that the results observed line up squarely with the conclusions of similar studies in the past and can be generalized across the country.

And Laskin notes that the error rate might actually be much higher, given the near certainty that many dentists don't often submit excised tissue to a lab for evaluation. Thus, and in many instances, a lesion that might in fact be problematic is never seen under a pathologist's microscope.

The study is published in the current issue of Quintessence International.

Related Resource: Medscape, "High Oral Lesion Misdiagnosis Rate Among Dentists" July 27, 2011