False lab results 'a huge shock,' widower tells cancer probe

A judicial inquiry examining flawed results at a St. John's pathology lab was told Tuesday about the case that tipped off officials about errors in breast cancer tests.

"It was a great shock — a huge shock," said Robert Deane, who told Justice Margaret Cameron about how he and his late wife, Peggy, reacted when oncologists informed them in 2005 that there had been an error in a hormone receptor test.

The false-negative test result meant that Peggy Deane, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer three years earlier, had been excluded from receiving Tamoxifen, an antihormonal treatment clinically shown to improve a patient's odds of survival.

Robert Deane, an orthopedic pediatrician who was active in his wife's treatment, had approached experts at the world-renowned Sloan-Kettering cancer centre in New York. Even before his wife was retested, he said, a U.S. physician said Peggy Deane's specific cancer — lobular carcinoma — is almost always hormone-related.

"If it had been diagnosed positive from the get-go, the whole course of the disease would probably have been a lot better, and she probably wouldn't have had to endure the types of chemo that she had," Deane testified.

Deane told the inquiry that he was told his wife's case is "why we're here now."

A lawyer for the commission acknowledged that Eastern Health referred to Deane as the "index patient."

He said he did not blame the physicians who broke the news about the inaccurate result.

"I didn't get mad at them, because they're only the messengers. They weren't responsible for the mistake. They were just giving me the news," he said.

Retests showed that the hunch was correct. Peggy Deane was put on Tamoxifen, although she died just a few months later — in August 2005, the same month that Eastern Health officials disclosed widespread problems with hormone receptor testing at the lab.

Meanwhile, another widower has told the inquiry that officials knew nine years ago about problems with hormone receptor testing.

Bryan Purcell testified Monday about the case of his late wife, Christine, who died in 2000.

Different test result

In 1999, Purcell said, a year after his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, Christine Purcell was told her hormone receptor test results excluded her from being considered for Tamoxifen.

Purcell said that a sister-in-law in Boston, a physician, offered to have her colleagues review the test. When that analysis produced a different result, Christine Purcell took that information to her physician.

The lab, at the Health Sciences Centre in St. John's, did the test again, and confirmed the findings by the Boston team. However, Purcell said that by that point, it was too late for Tamoxifen to have been of any benefit to his wife.

"If we had known how extensively the problem existed, we would've pursued it further and maybe we wouldn't be sitting here today," Purcell told Cameron, who is heading the inquiry that began hearing evidence last week.

"And maybe thousands of people wouldn't be in the state that they're in."

Peter Dawe, executive director of the Newfoundland and Labrador division of the Canadian Cancer Society, said he wants to know how officials responded in 1999 when they learned their lab had produced an inaccurate result.

"Did they see it as a one-off issue or was there any indication then that they had a systemic problem?" Dawe told CBC News.

The provincial government ordered the inquiry last year, after court documents — filed as part of a now-certified class action lawsuit — disclosed that officials were aware that the error rate of hundreds of tests was about 42 per cent, or several times higher than had been publicly acknowledged.