UCLA research found evidence that imaging may not be showing how serious patients’ prostate cancer is.
According to a release, “nearly half of high-risk prostate cancer patients previously classified as nonmetastatic by conventional imaging actually have metastatic disease when evaluated with advanced prostate-specific membrane antigen–positron emission tomography (PSMA-PET) imaging, suggesting that traditional imaging may underestimate how far the cancer has spread in many cases.”
The researchers used PSMA-PET vs. traditional imaging for this study. They “conducted a post hoc, retrospective cross-sectional study using data from 182 patients with high-risk recurrent prostate cancers who were thought to have disease limited to the prostate and were eligible for the EMBARK trial.”
PSMA-PET revealed cancer metastases in 46% of people traditional imaging showed the cancer had not spread. PSMA-PET also found lesions traditional imaging had not.
The study was published in JAMA Network Open.
