Specificity and sensitivity of ⁹⁹mTc-EDDA/HYNIC-Tyr³-octreotide (⁹⁹mTc-TOC) for imaging neuroendocrine tumors.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Octreotide in this clinical trial publication.

Gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) are cancers originating from neuroendocrine organs such as the pancreas, pituitary, thyroid, and adrenal glands and tumors arising from the diffuse neuroendocrine cells that are widely distributed throughout the body.

NETs express somatostatin (SS) and contain a high density of SS receptors; therefore, they can be specifically targeted with SS-based radiopharmaceuticals.

The aim of this research was to determine the validity in terms of specificity, sensitivity, and the agreement beyond chance with the biopsy (gold standard) of the ⁹⁹mTc-EDDA-HYNIC-Tyr³octreotide (⁹⁹mTc-TOC) to image and localize NETs and their metastases.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are young adults, adults, middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

Fifty-six consecutive Mexican patients with a previous presumptive diagnosis of NETs underwent several clinical and laboratory studies and were referred to the Nuclear Medicine Department for a routine scan with ⁹⁹mTc-TOC.

The patients were injected with 500-600 MBq ⁹⁹mTc-TOC, and whole-body images were obtained 2 h later with a SPECT or a SPECT/CT camera.

How the Study Was Run

Two nuclear medicine physicians observed the images and classified them as 17 negative and 39 positive.

After correlating the image of each patient with their 'gold standard' (biopsy, clinical history, morphological images, and tumor marker assays), the ⁹⁹mTc-TOC images were classified by the same two physicians as 12 true negatives, five false negatives, 38 true positives and one false positive.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Digestive System Neoplasms, Multimodal Imaging, Neuroendocrine Tumors, Organotechnetium Compounds, Positron-Emission Tomography, Radiopharmaceuticals and Reproducibility of Results.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is a clinical trial of Octreotide.

Its findings take up roughly 3 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2012 (Nuclear medicine communications), a journal based in England.

More context: the Octreotide compound page, all human trials.