Cancer patients suffer as Kashmir hospitals lack PET scan

By
Daily Excelsior
-

Excelsior Correspondent
Srinagar, Feb 5: With alarming rise in cancer cases, Doctors Association Kashmir (DAK) today said the Kashmir hospitals lack facilities to deal with cancer patients.
Voicing concern over lack of facilities, the DAK president, Dr Nisar-ul-Hassan said the patients suffer immensely due to lack of PET scan which has become the standard of imaging care in the field of oncology. “The Regional Cancer center at SKIMS and SMHS hospital that deal with cancer patients are without PET scan which is an essential tool to detect cancer,” he said.
Patients are referred outside state for the scan which majority cannot afford and doctors end up on a compromise in diagnosis, he said. “Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan now almost 30 years after its initial development has become an established imaging modality and is routinely used in the diagnosis, staging, treatment monitoring and identification of recurrent disease in a large number of malignancies,” the DAK president said.
Dr Nisar said the scan which uses radioactive substance called fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) helps doctors to work out what treatment is best for patients. “Many cancer patients need it to know whether they are cancer free or need more treatment. PET offers substantial advantages over CT or MRI as it can distinguish between benign and malignant lesions when CT and MRI cannot,” he said.
He said in a study, accuracy of staging in lung cancer ranged from 86% to 90% with PET scan while as CT scan was 63% to 64% accurate “In another study, 27 patients underwent restaging of lymphoma and PET was found 95% accurate as against 84% with CT scan. PET has emerged as an indispensable tool in carcinoma of unknown origin to detect primary site, which influences the choice of chemotherapy, when other imaging and histopathology fail to show the primary site,” the DAK president informed.
Moreover, he said, PET scan can be used to detect preclinical Alzheimer’s disease and also asses how much heart muscle has been damaged by a heart attack.

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