Recent Research on Nuclear Medicine Breast Imaging
In a recent study conducted by Italian researchers, mammography and nuclear medicine breast imaging were compared in 134 women aged 32 to 78. While the overall accuracy of the two tests were similar, mammography was less likely to identify breast cancer in the younger women than the nuclear medicine test. This suggests that nuclear medicine may be effective in women with dense breast tissue. The researchers concluded that nuclear medicine may help in surgical planning because of its high specificity and could be considered complimentary to mammography, especially in younger women. A Turkish study also found that nuclear medicine breast imaging may be helpful in detecting breast cancer that had spread to the axillary (armpit) lymph nodes. In fact, nuclear medicine imaging is sometimes used with sentinel lymph node biopsy to help determine if the lymph nodes contain cancer cells.
In another study by researchers from the Los Robles Regional Medical Center in California, nuclear medicine breast imaging was evaluated in 75 patients with signs on either mammography or physical exam that might or might not have indicated breast cancer. Of the 30 diagnosed cancers, 27 were positively identified with nuclear medicine. Eight of those 27 cancers were not identified with mammography or physical exam, and 11 of the cancers were smaller than one centimeter. The researchers concluded that nuclear medicine is a useful method of evaluating patients with indeterminate (difficult to read) mammograms or physical exams and may help detect additional small breast tumors. However, further research is needed to confirm the results of this study, especially since previous studies have shown that nuclear medicine may not be helpful in detecting small breast abnormalities.
