A new study shows that positron emission tomography, known as PET scans, may tell doctors how well a leukemia patient is responding after just one day of chemotherapy.
"This has very profound implications for patients," Dr. Matt Vanderhoek told Reuters Health. "Instead of making the patient go through a week of chemotherapy only to find out after the fact that their chemotherapy wasn't successful, therapy could be modified and changed on the fly."
The University of Wisconsin researcher will present the research Thursday at the 50th annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, underway in Houston, Texas.
Treating leukemia typically involves killing the cancer cells where they originate in the bone marrow. Doctors traditionally take a bone marrow biopsy up to a week after the end of chemotherapy to see how well the cancer-killing drugs have worked.
"The problem with the bone marrow biopsy is that it is an insensitive and weak predictor of treatment response," Vanderhoek said. "A lot of patients will be told that their treatment was successful when in fact it wasn't. As a result you have a patient who has undergone a week of chemotherapy only to find out much later on that their treatment was unsuccessful."
In eight patients with a type of leukemia called acute myeloid leukemia (AML) undergoing a standard 7-day course of chemotherapy, Vanderhoek's team found that a PET scan using a PET radio-tracer called FLT obtained after only one day of chemotherapy can indicate whether or not the patient is responding to chemotherapy.
According to Vanderhoek and colleagues, brightness and non-uniformity in the bone marrow FLT PET scan was an indication that the patient was not responding to chemotherapy.
"We hope that this data will provide enough evidence for a larger study to reach more definitive conclusions" on the value of FLT PET in determining response to chemotherapy in leukemia patients, Vanderhoek said.
For more information visit http://www.jigfo.com, the no.1 source of information.
No comments:
Post a Comment