Fwd: Is my chemo working? Scans may give faster answer

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090304/ap_on_he_me/med_chemotherapy_scansComplete article at link....a few highlights below

\Sent from Express News

NEW YORK - When Mike s learned his lungs were riddled with cancer, it took only a week to start chemotherapy - but six weeks to find out if it was doing any good. " You're going through all this suffering and stuff and you want to know, am I going to survive? Is this stuff working? " said s, 48, of La Jolla, Calif. " Your whole life is in sort of a limbo. "

......This experimental imaging relies on a familiar hospital workhorse: PET scans, typically used for things like detecting cancer or revealing the effects of a heart attack. Unlike CT scans or MRIs, PET scans can show a tumor's internal activity, not just its size.

..... " Our hope ... is you might be able to give a single dose of a chemotherapy agent and within a day or two figure out whether the tumor is going to respond, " says Dr. Graham of the University of Iowa.

....The hope is that, over time, FLT PET would prove reliable for giving a faster answer on whether an experimental treatment is working. That would save companies a lot of money, because they could spot ineffective drugs more quickly and not waste further research on them. And the drug company research would produce data to help persuade federal regulators to approve FLT PET for use in tracking therapy.

-- Emersonwww.flhw.org