PET/CT useful for initial staging of inflammatory breast cancer

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - PET/CT is useful for the initial staging of inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), according to a report in the February Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

"IBC is a distinct and separate entity from common garden-variety cancer or early breast cancer," Dr. Wei-Tse Yang from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, told Reuters Health. "PET/CT has found a role in this subset of patients, by outlining the extent of global and loco-regional disease, which in turn influences treatment strategy."

Dr. Yang and colleagues evaluated the accuracy of 18F-FDG PET/CT in the initial staging of IBC in 41 women with newly diagnosed, unilateral, primary IBC.

PET/CT showed hypermetabolic uptake in the affected breast in all but one patient, the authors report, and all patients had skin thickening.

PET/CT detected nodal metastases in 37 patients, which was confirmed by biopsy, the researchers note.

Distant metastases were found by PET/CT in 20 patients, including 7 patients with negative findings by other methods. Bone metastases were identified in 9 patients, liver metastases in 6 patients, pulmonary parenchymal metastases in 2 patients, and contralateral lymph node metastases in 7 patients.

"Although PET/CT is currently unable to allow clinicians to bypass all other imaging studies," the investigators say, "further prospective studies are warranted to determine the validity of these preliminary findings."

"We will be studying in greater detail the impact of SUV (standardized uptake values) as an aid in the diagnosis of metastases in the body in this subset of patients," Dr. Yang said.

"If validated, the cost of a PET/CT study in these patients may be equivalent to the total cost of imaging multiple organs and allow a single hospital visit and decreased imaging time, when compared with the time required for a battery of staging studies," the researchers add.

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