Mini atlas of oral pathology

  • K. M. K. Masthan
UK: Anshan price £19.99; pp 236 ISBN 9781848290112 | ISBN: 978-1-8482-9011-2

This book forms part of the Anshan Gold Standard Mini Atlas Series and is designed primarily for dental students. It aims to present oral histology and histopathology in a simple and easy to understand manner. The book focuses mainly on histology with no emphasis on incidence, prevalence, clinical features or pathogenesis of the conditions described.

The first section describes the normal histology of epithelium, connective tissues and connective tissue cells; the second part concentrates on oral histopathology. The information is delivered in a bullet point format with a histology slide and hand drawn diagram for most of the conditions. The majority of conditions are described over two pages but these are overleaf rather than as a two page spread, which is disappointing as it makes the diagrams and histology slides difficult to correlate.

The reader using this book would need a basic understanding of histology as there are no definitions offered and it would benefit from a glossary of many of the key terms.

The drawings for the microdontia and macrodontia sections are of very limited value, they offer the reader very little in the way of extra information and the jaw size and teeth should have been standardised to enable a better comparison.

The Atlas comes with a CD-ROM; this offers no further information and is merely a CD containing all the images found within the print. It does allow the histology slides to be viewed on a larger scale.

I was surprised to see pyogenic granulomata included in the 'Bacterial Viral and Mycotic Infection' chapter of the atlas as this gives the impression pyogenic granulomas are of an infective nature. Similarly leukoplakia is included in the 'Benign Tumours of Epithelial Origin' section despite leukoplakia being a clinical diagnosis and this is not clarified.

There are spelling mistakes throughout the book and the grammar used is not always what you expect from a UK written book. Overall this may be used as an adjunct to other books on the subject but is unlikely to be the mainstay of study in this area.