The Value of Radionuclide Bone Scan in Renal Cell Carcinoma

Kwak, Cheol; Byeon, Seok Soo; Park, Eun Chan; Lee, Sang Eun

Abstract

The need for routine radionuclide bone scan as part of the preoperative metastatic work-up in patients with renal cell carcinoma has been debated by several investigators more than 10 years. To investigate the value of radionuclide bone scan, radionuclide bone scans were performed preoperatively as part of staging procedures in 79 patients of 91 patients with renal cell carcinoma from 1989 to 1994. We analyzed the findings of bone scan according to the clinical and laboratory variables. When hot uptake was detected on the preoperative bone scan, it was interpreted positive if there was no history of trauma or absence of bone and joint disease such as degenerative Joint disease or arthritis. The bone scans were positive in 21 cases ( 26.6%) and negative in 58 cases (73.4%). The bone scans were neither correlated with the clinical variables such as incidentaloma, age of the patient, performance status, bone pain, the size of the tumor, T category of the tumor, thrombosis of renal vein or IVC, lymph node metastasis and extraskeletal metastasis nor with laboratory variables such as serum alkaline phosphatase, hemoglobin, serum calcium and ESR. We also analyzed positive scan according to the number of bony lesions. There was no correlation between the number of lesions on bone scan and clinica1 and laboratory variables. In conclusion, there was no clinical and laboratory parameters predicting positivity of bone scan. This suggests that all patients with renal cell carcinoma should be staged routinely with preoperative bone scan as the part of the initial clinical work up.