Tom, My experience is that I have had areas of slightly raised uptake in my PET scans that were done a year and 1/2 out and two and 1/2 years out.My understanding is it can be from scar tissue that gets stretched daily and can continue or get slightly worse over time if fibrosis continues to form or gets worse(which it can). In addition I still have chronicaly inflamed areas of my mouth which I know must show up as not totally normal on the PET, but I assume they do not change or maybe have decresed enough over time that my ENT thinks all in all things are OK.

Quite honestly, PETS can give a lot of false alarms and the last time I had one (a few months ago) I did NOT ask to see the radiologists report, I just took my ENT's word that overall everything looked OK because the one the year before had a report that would have been quite scary had not my ENT scoped me and done a thorough exame and told me it was really nothing to worry about before I read it.

As David said, my MO told me that SUV values can run much higher than single digits and that soemthing that's clearly cancer will not have a value of just over 3 but a much higher value. Its just that the people who read the PETS have to mention anything around a 3 just to cover their a--es as being a possible recurrence of cancer. So the reports can be scary to read unless you are a doctor with some knowledge.

Nelie