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Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is an important staging tool in lung and esophageal cancer and may be useful for assessing response to therapy. Medicare guidelines limit the number of permissible scans during treatment and follow-up, but recommendations regarding PET utilization in long-term follow-up are not established.
Now, investigators have linked Medicare data and Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data to evaluate the impact of PET-scan utilization on survival in nearly 100,000 patients with incident lung cancer and 4500 patients with incident esophageal cancer from 2005 to 2009.
A total of 7.4% of lung cancer patients and 11.1% of esophageal cancer patients underwent more than three PET scans. However, exclu…