Diagnostic Imaging
1–16 Objective and Noninvasive Detection of Sub-clinical Lung Injury in Breast Cancer Patients After Radiotherapy

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1043-321X(07)80026-9Get rights and content

Section snippets

Aims

We employed technetium-99m hexamethylpropylene amine oxime (Tc-99m HMPAO) lung scan to detect sub-clinical lung injury after radiation therapy of 60 female patients diagnosed with right breast cancer.

Methods

The degree of pulmonary vascular endothelium damage was represented as lung/liver uptake ratios (L/L ratios) calculated on Tc-99m HMPAO lung scan. All patients underwent simple mastectomy and postoperative radiotherapy of approximately 50 Gy. We divided the patients into three groups according to the interval between radiotherapy and lung Tc-99m HMPAO lung scan: Group 1 included 20 patients who received the lung scan within 1-3 months after radiotherapy, group 2 included 20 patients were within

Results

The L/L ratios were 0.32±0.04 for normal controls, 0.59±0.10 for group 1, 0.55±0.07 for group 2, and 0.34±0.04 for group 3, respectively. Based on our preliminary results, we found that sub-clinical lung injury and significantly increased L/L ratio in breast cancer patients received radiotherapy may occur within the first 6 months after radiotherapy. However, the L/L ratio is markedly decreased after 9 months.

Conclusion

Our findings concluded that the degree of pulmonary vascular endothelium damage represented as the L/L ratio on Tc-99m HMPAO lung scan has the potential to be a sensitive, objective and noninvasive method to detect sub-clinical lung injury in breast cancer patients received radiotherapy.

References (3)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (0)

View full text