Is PET/CT essential in the diagnosis and follow-up of temporal arteritis?

Publication date: Available online 9 September 2017
Source:Autoimmunity Reviews
Author(s): Carlo Salvarani, Alessandra Soriano, Francesco Muratore, Yehuda Shoenfeld, Daniel Blockmans
The increasing availability and improvement of imaging techniques are deeply influencing diagnosis and work-up of patients affected with vasculitis, particularly those with large vessel vasculitis (LVV). Fluorodeoxyglucose (¹⁸F-FDG) positron emission tomography (PET), especially when integrated with computed tomography (CT), is taking hold as a useful diagnostic technique to examine the aorta and the other large vessels in giant cell arteritis (GCA) with concomitant large vessel involvement (LV-GCA). In this paper we examined the progresses performed in this field in the last twenty years and the evidence available so far according to two different points of view ('pros' and 'cons'), in order to give a comprehensive answer to a still open question about the role of PET/CT in the diagnosis and follow-up of GCA.



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