Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women, with more than 200,000 new cases diagnosed each year. For many patients, chemotherapy is the best treatment option. While FDG PET has previously been shown to be an effective diagnostic and treatment monitoring tool for breast cancer, the elevated uptake of FDG by treated tumors can persist, especially in the early stages of chemotherapy – which could create the impression that the treatment is less effective than it actually is.
Seeking a more accurate predictor of the ultimate effect of chemotherapy on breast cancer tumors, researchers decided to explore the use of 18F-FLT, which was developed to mark cellular proliferation. Dr. Pio and colleagues in the Departments of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology and Hematology-Oncology at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine in Los Angeles, California presented the results of this study comparing the effectiveness of FDG and FLT imaging for monitoring and predicting tumor response to chemotherapy at the Society of Nuclear Medicine’s 50th Annual Meeting.
The study compared FDG and FLT PET images for 11 newly diagnosed breast cancer patients. PET scans were taken prior to beginning a chemotherapy regimen, two weeks after the first dose of that regimen, and two weeks following the final cycle of the regimen. Results consistently revealed that FLT was a more accurate predictor of eventual CA27.29 (the breast cancer antigen) response as well as the ultimate tumor response.