PET Found to be effective in the Evaluation of Cancer Treatment

In a new study by researchers at UCLA published on February 1 2008, standard methods of cancer detection were compared to position emission tomography (PET) and the results were surprising. A multidisciplinary group of scientists were assembled at the Jonsson Cancer Center to evaluate PET, and the team found that the scans were 100 percent accurate when it came to detecting a patient's response to tumor therapy. This is huge, considering the study concluded that standard cancer evaluation procedures only worked for 20 percent of responders.

What this boils down to for patients is a failure of conventional imaging. Because it may fail to detect a response to treatment, physicians my decide to stop treatments that may actually be working. On the other side of the aisle, a PET scan can confirm that a treatment is not working, preventing patients from undergoing excessive toxic therapies that are useless.

“Just because the tumor doesn't shrink doesn't mean the treatment didn't work,” said Dr. Fritz Eilber, senior author of the study, assistant professor of surgery and director of the Sarcoma Program at the Jonsson Cancer Center. “We have removed many tumors that have not changed in size with treatment or have even grown but are completely dead on pathologic analysis.”

In most cases, MRI and CT scans (which provide anatomical pictures of a patient's body) are used to detect a tumor's response to therapy. PET images, on the other hand, watches what the body is doing and acts as a molecular camera of sorts. A PET probe can pick up on the metabolism of sugar, which is important because cancer cells metabolize much more sugar than regular cells. After treatment, if the probe comes back negative for sugar metabolism, the cells are dead.

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