Evaluation of Diffusely High Uptake of the Skull in Breast and Prostate Cancer using Bone Scintigraphy

Abstract

The National Cancer Registry in Sudan in (2016) found that the most common diagnosed cancer for the last ten years among women was breast cancer, and for men was Prostate cancer. Bone scan is a very important diagnostic and follow-up procedure for those patients, deciding the ideal treatment plan. When reporting bone scans, it is important to distinguish between normal appearances and skeletal pathology; (cancer metastases), involving the skull. The limitations of WB scan reports at NM-departments in Khartoum state coms because it depends on subjective reporting only, whereas in these cases the metastases occurred at a very sensitive part of human body and it's hard to distinguish for the most of the cases. The general aim of this study is to evaluate a diffusely high uptake of skull in breast and prostate cancer using bone Scintigraphy. The study was done at Khartoum Oncology Hospital, for total of (100) adult patients of breast and prostate cancer with normal bone scans, and the data collected using master data collection sheet, and image were processing for the calculation of Skull uptake. The main results of this study were: skull uptake showed significantly higher in female patients in the age groups (30-39 years and above). While in males the upper age groups (60-69 years and above) had significantly higher uptake than the lower age group. There was significant correlation between skull uptake and age (P<.001) as well as with gender (P<.001); (35 of female patients had higher uptake levels compare to 11 male patients). This study concluded that “hot skull” is not necessarily an abnormal finding, especially in elderly women. Recommend that every nuclear medicine department Considering the normal variants that can affect the reporting of bone scan, and uses it is own normal values and reference samples for quantitative evaluation, due to racial or socio-economical variations.