Research made possible by a gift left in her Will by a supporter of PSSC finds that whole-body MRI could drastically improve metastatic breast cancer care.
Research made possible by a gift left in her Will by a supporter of Paul Strickland Scanner Centre finds that whole-body MRI could drastically improve metastatic breast cancer care.
People being treated for metastatic breast cancer could be granted precious extra healthy time with their loved ones, thanks to the results of a landmark research study supported by Paul Strickland Scanner Centre. The results of the RESPECT research were published in Radiology, the highly respected journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
The study found that whole-body MRI scans can identify cancer progression earlier in patients who are receiving anti-cancer therapy and where disease has spread to the bones.
The MRI scans were better than body CT or bone scans. This means that whole-body MRI enables patients to receive the right treatment at the right time and for the right duration. The ability to accurately and quickly identify when treatments are no longer working is important because it may allow for an earlier switch away from an ineffective treatment, thus allowing for a personalised approach to their treatment.
Paul Strickland Scanner Centre has carried out more whole-body MRI scans for cancer than any other centre in the world, making us the global leader in this area.
The research study, carried out in partnership with Mount Vernon Cancer Centre, was funded jointly by Paul Strickland Scanner Centre and the charity Fighting Breast Cancer. Our element of the funding was the direct result of a gift left by a supporter in their Will, which co-funded the recent fellowship of research fellow Dr Michael Kosmin. Amongst others, Dr Kosmin features alongside Prof Anwar Padhani (our lead consultant for MRI) and Dr Andrew Gogbashian (our lead consultant for CT) as an author of the published results.
At the time that the research was being carried out, Dr Kosmin said: “If a patient has been diagnosed with breast cancer that’s spread to the bone, we’d want to start treatment and see after a few months whether the treatment is working or not.”
When it has been identified that a treatment has stopped working and disease is progressing, doctors can then change it as soon as they know.
The RESPECT study has shown that whole-body MRI scans show disease progression in the bone before CT in 67% of cases, and before bone scans in 50% of cases.
The article Comparison of Whole-Body MRI, CT, and Bone Scintigraphy for Response Evaluation of Cancer Therapeutics in Metastatic Breast Cancer to Bone can be downloaded from https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/pdf/10.1148/radiol.2020192683
