PET/CT scans can detect major depression in cancer patients: Study
USA: Whole-body FDG PET/CT scans can help in the detection of major depression in cancer patients, finds a recent study in the PLOS One. These findings suggest that in addition to staging and evaluating response to chemoradiation therapies, PET/CT images can help in screening for major depression in cancer patients.
Major depression is a common comorbidity in cancer patients -- 1 in 4 cancer patients experience major depression. Oncology clinics lack practical, objective tools for simultaneous evaluation of major depression and cancer. Fludeoxyglucose F-18 positron emission tomography-computed tomography (FDG PET/CT) is universally applied in modern medicine. Xiaofei Wang, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR, USA, and colleagues aimed to explore predictive models to identify major depression cases from multiple myeloma patients.
For this purpose, they used a retrospective analysis of whole-body FDG PET/CT images to identify brain regional metabolic patterns of major depression in multiple myeloma patients. The study included 134 multiple myeloma (MM) patients, 38 with major depression (group 1) and 96 without major depression (group 2).
Key findings of the study include:
- In the current study, Statistic Parameter Mapping (SPM) demonstrated that the major depression patient group (n = 38) had significant regional metabolic differences (clusters of continuous voxels) as compared to the non-major depression group (n = 96) with the criteria of height threshold, T = 4.38 and extent threshold > 100 voxels.
- · The five significant hypo- and three hyper-metabolic clusters from the computed T contrast maps were localized on the glass-brain view, consistent with published brain metabolic changes in major depression patients.
- · Using these clusters as features for classification learner, the fine tree and medium tree algorithms from 25 classification algorithms best fitted our data (accuracy 0.85%; AUC 0.88; sensitivity 79%; and specificity 88%).
"This study demonstrated that whole-body FDG PET/CT scans could provide added value for screening for major depression in cancer patients in addition to staging and evaluating response to chemoradiation therapies," wrote the authors.
Reference:
The study titled, "Resting-state brain metabolic fingerprinting clusters (biomarkers) and predictive models for major depression in multiple myeloma patients," is published in PLOS One.
DOI: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0251026#sec020
