Ultra-Low Dose Total Body PET/CT Effective for Evaluating Arthritis
Total body PET/CT scans can successfully visualize systemic joint involvement in patients with autoimmune arthritis, according to new first-in-human research published in the October issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. The total body PET/CT scans showed high agreement with standard joint-by-joint rheumatological evaluation and a moderate to strong correlation with rheumatological outcome measures.
Autoimmune inflammatory arthritides (AIA)—such as psoriatic arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis—are chronic, systemic conditions that cause joint inflammation, joint destruction and pain. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately one in four adults, or 58 million Americans, have been diagnosed with arthritis by a doctor. By 2040, an estimated 78 million adults are projected to be diagnosed with arthritis.
“Currently, there are significant clinical challenges in managing AIA populations. For example, it is unclear which patients should receive which treatments, how exactly these treatments change the inflammatory status of different tissues or outcomes, and the impact the disease and treatments have on other organs of the body,” said Abhijit J. Chaudhari, professor of radiology at the UC Davis and director of the Center for Molecular and Genomic Imaging (CMGI) in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. “Systemic molecular imaging enabled by total body PET could provide currently unavailable, objective biomarkers that could help address these challenges.”
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The authors of “Total-Body 18F-FDG PET/CT in Autoimmune Inflammatory Arthritis at Ultra-Low Dose: Initial Observations” include Yasser Abdelhafez, Department of Radiology, University of California Davis, Davis, California, and Nuclear Medicine Unit, South Egypt Cancer Institute, Assiut University, Egypt; Siba P. Raychaudhuri, Department of Internal Medicine-Rheumatology, University of California Davis, Davis, California, and Northern California Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Mather, California; Dario Mazza, Heather L. Hunt, Kristin McBride, Mike Nguyen, Denise T. Caudle, Lorenzo Nardo and Abhijit J. Chaudhari, Department of Radiology, University of California Davis, Davis, California; Soumajyoti Sarkar, Department of Internal Medicine-Rheumatology, University of California Davis, Davis, California; Benjamin A. Spencer, Negar Omidvari, Simon Cherry and Ramsey D. Badawi, Department of Radiology, University of California Davis, Davis, California, and Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California Davis, Davis, California; and Heejung Bang, Department of Public Health Sciences, University of California Davis, Davis, California.