Clinical impact of 18F-FDG PET in management of patients with renal cell carcinoma

We performed a retrospective study to evaluate the accuracy, diagnostic validity, and clinical impact of F-18-FDG PET in the management of recurrent and metastatic disease in patients with Renal Cell Carcinoma (RCC) from our database. F-18-FDG PET studies were identified from 58 patients that matched our criteria for inclusion in the study. Results were confirmed with histopathological findings, clinical follow-up time (at least 12 months), and/ or conventional imaging methods (CIM). A sensitivity of 80.56%, specificity 86.36%, diagnostic accuracy 58.7%, positive predictive value 90.63%, and a negative predictive value of 73.08% were observed. The clinical impact was high in 25 cases (43%) and we found no impact in only 10 studies (17.2%), We concluded that 18F-FDG PET was useful and had a high clinical impact in the management of recurrent and metastatic RCC. From our data, it seemed that a positive PET study was more helpful to the physician than a negative study. (C) 2009 Elsevier Espana, S.L. y SEMNIM. All rights reserved.