PET Scans

This article outlines why I am planning to get a PET scan. I am hoping my insurance will cover it but if it doesn’t I will deal with it because I believe it will help me monitor this lump better than any other test so far.

Some excerpts from the above article:

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PET scans performed better than conventional imaging tests on two important dimensions:

• Sensitivity refers to a test’s ability to find the earliest signs of active cancer. PET scans found 93% of the true positives, while conventional imaging tests found 78%.
• Specificity refers to how reliable a test is—how good it is at saying for sure whether something is there or not and whether it’s truly a problem. In this study, 84% of the positives found by PET scans were true positives, so only 16% were false positives, compared to 34% false positives for conventional imaging tests.

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PET scans found 6 “true positives” that were not found with conventional imaging tests. As a result those women began more aggressive treatment. Otherwise they would not have received treatment at that particular time. At the end of the study, these women’s tests were still positive (meaning they still had active cancer).
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Take-home message: Women who have already been treated for invasive breast cancer and are at high risk of recurrence are usually followed carefully by their doctors to see if everything is OK. Compared to the many different tests that can be used, PET scans may offer some advantages, as shown in this study.

PET is more likely than other tests to find something that’s wrong, and it’s more likely to give an accurate prediction about what’s going on.

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I will be going for a full body PET scan so they could actually pick up any other areas where it may have spread as well or confirm for me that it has NOT spread to any other location (which is more likely)