IQWiG finds no clear benefit of using PET/CT for patients with Bone or Soft Tissue Tumours

The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) has found no robust conclusions as to the benefits of using PET alone or in combination with CT for patients with Bone and Soft Tissue Tumours. IQWiG searched the international literature for studies that had examined the consequences of a diagnostic intervention using PET or PET/CT on health aspects of direct relevance to patients. However no studies have directly compared the benefit of these imaging techniques with conventional diagnostics.

In addition, IQWiG searched for studies that had assessed the diagnostic and prognostic accuracy offered by these techniques. IQWiG evaluated the results of a total of 32 individual studies on this topic. However, most of these studies only included few participants and were also susceptible to bias, so their results are subject to great uncertainty. IQWiG concludes that the possible benefit of PET or PET/CT in comparison with conventional techniques remains unclear.