A study looking at PET scans for people having treatment for breast cancer

This study looked at whether PET scans showed how well a chemotherapy drug called docetaxel worked in people with breast cancer.

Docetaxel is a chemotherapy drug that doctors sometimes use before surgery to treat early stage breast cancer or to treat breast cancer that has spread (metastatic).

Doctors often use scans (such as CT scans) before, during and after treatment to find out how well the treatment is working.

As chemotherapy can cause side effects, it is best to know as early as possible if treatment is working. If not working as well as the doctors hoped, they could change the treatment or stop it, depending on the situation.

Doctors thought that using a PET scan early on in treatment could help with this. PET scans can show cell growth, so if the treatment was slowing down the growth of the cancer, the scan should pick this up.

The researchers compared the PET scans to standard ways of measuring response to treatment, such as CT scans or ultrasound.