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Thomas Dworetzky, Contributing Reporter | January 18, 2017
There has been some concern that PET can be overused for early diagnosis of such cancer,
as HCB News reported in March, 2016.
At that time a study, published in JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, researchers examined the cases of nearly 101,600 lung and esophageal cancer patients from 2005 to 2009 using information from the National Cancer Institutes Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program, as well as Medicare claims data on follow-up through 2011.
For esophageal cancer, researcher Dr. Mark Healy of the University of Michigan Center for Healthcare Outcomes and Policy, and the lead author, found that the highest-utilizing PET hospitals had a mean adjusted two-year survival of 30.3 percent and the lowest-utilizing PET hospitals had a mean adjusted two-year survival of 28.4 percent.
However, the researchers didn’t include PET scans used for cancer staging or to monitor treatment, or to follow up a CT scan with an abnormal result.
“I personally think PET is a great technology for staging and following up with treatment,” Healy told HCB News. “There’s no reason to order these scans for someone who is asymptomatic. It provides a lot of useful information, but in this particular circumstance, it doesn’t appear to be helpful over other, lower-cost modalities.”
Dr. Ryan Niederkohr, chief of nuclear medicine at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center in California and president of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging’s PET Center of Excellence, said a limitation of the study is that it looked only at poor prognosis cancers.
“I don’t know that we can cross-apply the conclusions of this study to all cancer types,” Niederkohr told HCB News. “There may be other cancers where early detection may be valuable.”
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