Also note that Medicare is paying for these scans but how much is paid and the difficulty of getting approval may depend on your add-on plans. Someone just told me that a facility in Arizona is telling patients that they must wait 4 to 6 weeksafter their Sandostatin injection to get a Netspot scan. My scan was at Rocky Mountain Cancer Center where Dr. The machine is a bit bigger than a CT scan but is open on both ends so there is no claustrophobia.Įdit: Like NETs patients, each medical facility is different. That’s it! Unlike a normal CT scan there are no breathing instructions during the scan (“hold your breath”, “breathe”). You are given the injection, wait an hour, then climb onto the scanner bed pictured above and lay still for less than 40 minutes. It could be given 15 days after the last Sandostatin injection and they asked that you not use an octreotide “rescue” injection for a day. The Netspot PET/CT requires no preparation, no laxative, no fasting. I was warned that I would need a doctor’s letter to pass through an airport within 30 days of the injection. The hour long scan was repeated the next day and sometimes even a third and fourth day. After the injection we waited 4 hours, then had about an hour laying flat on my back without moving in the nuclear scanner. The old octreoscan routine was to wait until the end of my 28 day Sandostatin injection cycle then I had to take a laxative the night before and fast until I was given the injection.
NOTE: Although the gallium injectable is more radioactive than the indium-111 used in the octreoscan, the patient actually receives less radiation because the gallium-68 isotope has a much shorter life than the indium-111 isotope. We patients are given no warnings at all except to drink lots of water so the radiation won’t gather in the kidneys. The gallium radiation has a very short life. They were uploaded to Facebook for an example.Ĭombining the CT scan and the Netspot PET scan in one picture is even more powerful. My first radiologist showed me my first octreoscan and said “‘nuclear medicine’ is sometimes called ‘unclear medicine’!” These are not my scans. The black dots are areas of high “uptake” meaning attachment to the marker. This picture shows the difference between the GA-68 and the octreoscan. GA-68 scanĪfter my diagnosis, I have had more than six octreoscans (about one per year) and a CT scan every six months and one or two MRIs. They take the PET and the CT at the same time.īefore now the best we had for neuroendocrine tumors were CT scans, MRIs, and octreoscans which were a much weaker version of the GA-68 type of scan without the attached CT scan. The new PET machines are actually PET/CT machines. These take three dimensional xrays of the body. You are probably familiar with CT (xray Computed Tomography) scans. Apparently, they were not considered profitable enough to develop, test, and get approval for in the U.S. GA-68 scans have been used in Europe for over 15 years already. The PET cameras take pictures of the radiation in the body. Although some other tumor types and even some body parts (pituitary gland for instance) have receptors, if you are the lucky patient whose tumors have these receptors, you can get a good picture of where the tumors are by tracking the radiation. The tumors therefore will capture the somatostatin as it passes by and of course the radioactive GA-68 bound with it. Neuroendocrine tumors have receptors for the hormone somatostatin in over 60% of patients. The GA-68 (commercial name: Netspot) is an injectable that is a binding of radioactive gallium 68 to a somatostatin analog called octreotate. One year ago, the FDA approved a different kind of marker for use with PET scanners that is specifically designed for neuroendocrine tumor. The traditional PET scans normally do not work with neuroendocrine tumors because the biology of the tumor is different than most cancers so the standard markers do not function. If you have had a cancer or know people with cancer, you probably know that a PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scan is used to try to locate tumors and metastases. I figure it might help other people with NETS to explain what this scan is.
My own results are reported here: The Results of my GA-68 Scan.ĮDIT: There has been tremendous response to these two posts on social media. This was designed specifically to detect neuroendocrine tumors. A few days ago, I had a scan for cancer called a GA-68 or gallium-68 or Netspot.
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