Aditi complained having pain in her right arm consistently since last two weeks.
On further interrogation she told that she had fight with her classmate and was pushed hard by her. Investigations like X-ray, ultrasound and MRI revealed osteosarcoma in a lively twelve year old girl.
Yesterday she had PET Scan done.
Osteosarcoma is a disease in which cancer (malignant) cells are found in the bone.
It is the most common type of bone cancer.
Osteosarcoma most often occurs in adolescents and young adults.
Positron emission tomography (PET) is an advanced diagnostic imaging technique that is used for diagnosis, staging and restaging after treatment or recurrence of various cancers.
This technique exploits the increased metabolism of glucose in malignant viable cells.
2-[fluorine18-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (FDG) which is an analogue of glucose detects the difference in glucose metabolism.
Like glucose, FDG is transported into tumor cells, by means of glucose transporter protein and subsequently it is phosphorylated by an enzyme hexokinase to FDG-6-phosphate.
As FDG-6-phosphate is not a substrate for glucose-6-phosphate isomerase (the next step in glycolysis), it is biochemically trapped within the cell.
This process of metabolic trapping in cell constitutes the basis for imaging of distribution of tracer with PET. Since there is many fold increase in glucose metabolism in malignant tumors as compared to normal, it is easy to detect this difference in metabolism using PET.
Therefore PET has high sensitivity and high negative predictive value as compared to conventional morphological modalities like computed tomography (CT), Ultrasonography (USG), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which use size as the only or major criterion to distinguish between benign and malignant disease in lymph nodes.
In osteosarcoma, degree of FDG uptake in tumour has good correlation with histological grading or tumour aggressiveness.
 |
| osteosarcoma of humerus |
 |
| PET Scan |
Her reports show that tumor is in initial stage, no metastasis. It's good news, osteosarcoma is curable with 75% survival rate with limb preservation modality.
Let's hope and pray for the best!
No comments:
Post a Comment