Cheryl

IMO PETscans are NOT worth paying for with the one exception being for radiological planning IF you had radiation to the tongue. I'm biased of course since PETscans have over a 50% false positive rate for tongue cancers and in my personal experience, a 100% false positive rate and then worse, actually missed the cancer when it did finally come back.
Here is a link to one study documenting how easy it is for even good radiologists to have to report possible cancer in the tongue even though the facts are that the healing tongue tissue takes in just as much if not more sugar than a cancer tumor would.
[quote]Conversely, definitive radiotherapy occasionally causes severe muscle atrophy with the disappearance of tumour volume and residual fibrosis, resulting in a limitation in tongue movement [21, 22]. In such cases, the balance of lingual muscle activity may be broken and altered.

Together, the high uptake of FDG in these three patients probably relates to ill-balanced high activity of the lingual muscles after definitive radiotherapy. Radiologists should take this false-positive accumulation of FDG into account when interpreting PET images of patients who have received definitive radiotherapy for the mobile tongue.[/quote]In today's litigatious society, no radiologist can afford not to say it could be cancer since the Petscan results for recovering tongue tissue do indeed mimic the results of a cancer tumor.
Now all my doctors, the RO, the MO, the ENT and even my oral cancer specialist prosthodontist agree that for me, the MRI/CT is the best diagnostic test. The MRI spotted my tumor when it came back.
False-positive positron emission tomography
don't waste your money
charm