New scan may help find aggressive prostate tumors
January 29th, 2010 Posted in prostate cancer diagnosisAccording to recent report of Leo L. Cheng, an assistant professor of radiology and pathology at Harvard Medical School and a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, a new imaging technology promises to achieve the long-sought goal of singling out prostate cancers that are life-threatening and require the most aggressive treatment, researchers report.
The new study used magnetic resonance spectroscopy on five cancerous prostate glands removed from men with the diagnosis. The results of the scans were compared with those of the standard technique, which judges a cancer by the degree of disorder produced by the malignancy. Five of seven regions identified as cancerous by that method scored high on a magnetic resonance spectroscopy malignancy index. The other two regions were near the outer edges of the glands, where exposure to air made the magnetic resonance results less clear.
Magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which provides information about the metabolic chemistry of suspected cancerous tissue, gave good results in a small trial in which its readings were compared with those of current measures of prostate cancer danger, according to a report published Jan. 27 in Science Translational Medicine.