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The Current Status of PSMA PET-CT for Evaluating Biochemical PSA Relapse in Prostate Cancer

  • Oncology (S Delorme, Section Editor)
  • Published:
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Abstract

In the curative treatment of prostate cancer (PC), up to 40 % of PC cases may suffer disease recurrence depending on their prognostic factors. In these men, monitoring with prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing may herald this event but it does not provide information on the site or extent of PC recurrence. It remains important to have an imaging modality that can detect disease recurrence at the earliest stage when disease may still be local or regional and radical ablative therapies could provide recurrence salvage or to reliably exclude patients from unnecessary therapy when there is evidence of distant micrometastatic disease. Functional imaging can provide improved detection over conventional imaging with CT, MRI and bone scanning. Choline PET has been reported to have higher PC detection sensitivity than FDG-PET but this falls with lower PSA values. PSMA PET has been reported to provide greater sensitivity and specificity particularly with lower PSA, i.e. <0.5–1 and may yield greater utility to quantify the relapse status of PC men. This article will review the status of PSMA PET-CT for PSA recurrences following PC treatment.

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Acknowledgments

VK acknowledges support from the NIHR RM/ICR Biomedical Research Centre, Monash University and University of Melbourne.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Royal Surrey County Hospital, Guildford, UK

    Karen Chan

  2. Royal Marsden Hospital, Institute of Cancer Research, London, SW3 6JJ, UK

    Karen Chan & Vincent Khoo

  3. Department of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Vincent Khoo

  4. Department of Radiation Oncology & Medicine, Austin Hospital, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Vincent Khoo

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  1. Karen Chan
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Correspondence to Vincent Khoo.

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Karen Chan and Vincent Khoo each declare no potential conflicts of interest.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Oncology.

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Chan, K., Khoo, V. The Current Status of PSMA PET-CT for Evaluating Biochemical PSA Relapse in Prostate Cancer. Curr Radiol Rep 4, 36 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40134-016-0162-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40134-016-0162-z

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