Original articlePositron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging in Merkel cell carcinoma: A study of 270 scans in 97 patients at the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center
Section snippets
Methods
This study was approved by the institutional review board at DF/BWCC. From our patient database, we identified patients with a histologic diagnosis of MCC who underwent FDG-PET or PET/CT imaging at DF/BWCC between August 2003 and December 2010. Clinical data were extracted from the electronic medical record. Patients were staged according to the AJCC guidelines: primary tumor 2 cm or smaller without regional lymph node metastasis by histologic (stage IA) or clinical (stage IB) examination;
Results
In all, 97 patients underwent 270 FDG-PET/CT studies at the DF/BWCC from August 2003 to December 2010. The mean age at diagnosis was 70 years (range 44-91). There were 56 men (58%) and 41 women (42%). A total of 94 patients were white and 3 patients were from Central America. Nine patients (9%) were immunosuppressed. Primary lesions were most commonly located on the head and neck (37/97, 38%) followed by near equal distribution on the upper (23/97, 24%) and lower (22/97, 23%) extremities,
Discussion
To our knowledge, this study represents the largest series of patients with MCC evaluated by FDG-PET/CT imaging. In keeping with the literature, our patients were older (mean age 70 years), predominantly white (97%), with a slight male preponderance (1.4:1). In contrast to previous larger studies,24, 25 primary tumors in our study were mainly located on the ultraviolet-exposed skin of the extremities (47%) followed by the head and neck (38%)3 (Table I). Given the anatomic distributions,
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Cited by (0)
Dr O'Regan is currently affiliated with the Department of Radiology, Cork University Hospital, Cork, Ireland; Dr Sheehy is currently affiliated with Department of Radiology, St James's Hospital, Dublin, Ireland; and Dr Wang is currently affiliated with the Institute for Cancer Care at Mercy Medical Center, Baltimore, Maryland.
Funding sources: None.
Conflicts of interest: None declared.