Prognostic significance of 18F-FDG PET at diagnosis in patients with soft tissue sarcoma and bone sarcoma; systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

PurposeThe usefulness of 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (18F-FDG PET) for the survival prognosis in soft tissue sarcoma (STS) and bone sarcoma (BS) is controversial. The objective of this systematic review was to provide an up-to-date and unprecedented summary of the prognostic value of 18F-FDG PET at diagnosis in STS and BS. MethodsStudies evaluating pre-treatment 18F-FDG PET for overall survival of STS and BS were systematically searched for in MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Web of Science. Comparative analyses of the pooled hazard ratios (HR) of overall survival were performed between patients with high and low maximum standardised uptake value (SUVmax). The quality of study designs was evaluated using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale (NOS) for quality assessment of cohort studies. P < 0.05 was defined as statistically significant. ResultsA total of six studies comprising 514 patients with STS and BS were considered for the meta-analysis. The pooled HR for overall survival was 1.22 (95% confidence interval: 1.03–1.46), suggesting that high SUVmax predicts a significantly shorter overall survival period than low SUVmax (P = 0.03). Additional subgroup analyses using patients with STS alone showed that high SUVmax might predict poorer overall survival than low SUVmax (P = 0.004), although only two studies consisting of 96 patients were included. The overall quality of the included studies evaluated by the NOS assessment was adequate. Conclusion18F-FDG PET at diagnosis provides a very useful predictive tool for patients with STS and BS.