LITERATURE REVIEW

Literature Review

Bone Scintigraphy or FDG-PET: Which is superior in detecting bone metastases in cancer patients?

Student ID Number: 090051657 Bone Scintigraphy or FDG-PET

Introduction

A bone scan is a procedure used to assess various bones of the bodies, whether they are free from diseases. It is used to track various diseases in the human skeleton.

When cancer cells breaks away from the primary tumour, they can to different parts of the body through the lymphatic system or through bloodstream. They can also end up in any organ or tissue where they begin to grow and form new tumours. The bones are usually the common site for these cancer cells to settle and to grow. Bone metastasis causes extreme in cancer patients and it is one of the most common issues among such patients. It makes the bone weaker and even causes the bone to break. Metastases can occur in any bone in the body, but these are most often found in the bones near the centre of the body like the spine. Other common sites are the pelvis, femur, humerus, ribs and skull. Early detection of skeletal involvement using imaging modalities is important for the treatment of malignancies. Technetium-99m methylene diphosphonate (99mTc - MDP) bone scan has been the most commonly used imaging modality for the detection of bone metastases because of its high sensitivity in detecting bone lesions, permits single whole-body examination, availability and less expensive (Özülker et al., 2010). In some cases it shows poor results and it is not accurate due to uptake of benign lesions which includes fractures, osteoarthritis, and inflammations (Nakai et al., 2005). Fluorine-18 Fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) which has gained wide application in the diagnosis, staging and follow-up of cancer patients, has proved to be an effective imaging modality complimentary to bone scan in the identification of bone metastases (Özülker et al., 2010).



Sources

Two articles about this topic were taken from Nuclear Medicine Communications. This is a monthly journal based in United Kingdom that publishes researches and clinical work in all areas of nuclear medicine. This is also the official journal of the British Nuclear Medicine Society (BNMS). The next article is from European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, a journal published by Springer and the official journal of European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM). The last article is from Annals of Nuclear Medicine which is the official journal of the Japanese Society of Nuclear Medicine (JSNM) and also published by Springer.

Methods and Materials

The articles discussed the capabilities of bone scan and FDG-PET in order to detect bone metastases among cancer patients. To get the necessary information about this topic, the authors needed to gather a decent number of patients that will clearly represent the population and that can come up with valid result. Özülker et al. identified 70 patients with various malignancies in their studies with mean age of 56.8 ± 13.49 years old. Fujimoto et al. had 95 cancer patients with mean age of 63.7 ± 15.7 years ...