Nuclear medicine review. Central & Eastern Europe
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Nucl Med Rev Cent East Eur · Jan 2007
Clinical TrialThe prognostic value of 18F-FDG PET-CT in the management of Hodgkin's lymphoma: preliminary results of a prospective study.
To date, Hodgkin's lymphoma (HL) patients have achieved long-term survival of more than 80%. Unfortunately, longer follow-up has shown serious adverse effects of the treatments used. For this reason, therapeutic strategies are becoming more tailored to the individual patient s prognosis. Pre-treatment risk factors for early-stage and advanced-stage HL are well known indicators of prognosis. Recently, early interim (18)F-FDG PET has been shown as a strong and independent predictor of progression-free survival in HL. Our aim was to assess response to therapy by repeating (18)F-FDG-PET/CT after four and six chemotherapy cycles. ⋯ The preliminary data of the present study confirm those of previous published studies about the negative predictive value of (18)F-FDG-PET/CT performed after four and six chemotherapy cycles, which contributed to the decision to stop treatment and to avoid radiotherapy in HL patients. Nonetheless, our preliminary data seems to suggest that only the (18)F-FDG-PET/CT performed after two cycles of chemotherapy (FDG-PET 2) is able to provide the same prognostic information of the FDG-PET 4 and FDG-PET 6 earlier.
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Nucl Med Rev Cent East Eur · Jan 2007
Utility of 18F-FDG PET and contrast-enhanced CT scan in the assessment of residual liver metastasis from colorectal cancer following adjuvant chemotherapy.
Neoadjuvant chemotherapy has been successfully used in the treatment of patients with colorectal liver metastases. The selection of patients for surgical resection after chemotherapy still poses a significant clinical challenge. (18)F-FDG PET is a useful tool in the assessment of liver metastases but the data regarding its sensitivity after chemotherapy is scarce. Our aim was to assess the value of this imaging modality in the selection of patients with colorectal liver metastasis for surgery following adjuvant chemotherapy. ⋯ These results suggest that (18)F-FDG PET and CT scan have sub-optimal sensitivity in the evaluation of colorectal liver lesions after neo-adjuvant chemotherapy, especially for lesions < 1 cm. The combined use of the two imaging techniques does not significantly increase the sensitivity of lesion detection.