Can pre-treatment 18F-FDG PET/CT predict prognosis of extranodal natural killer/T-cell lymphoma?

173 Objectives: The utility of pre-treatment 18F-FDG PET/CT in staging of patients with extranodal natural killer/T-cell lymphoma (ENKTL) has been established in recent years, but the role of it in predicting the prognosis of ENKTL is still inconclusive. Therefore, we evaluated the prediction value of pre-treatment 18F-FDG PET/CT in ENKTL.Methods: This is a prospective study, 60 consecutive patients with newly diagnosed ENKTL underwent 18F-FDG PET/CT scan before therapy. Forty-two patients received combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, 18 patients received chemotherapy alone. We recorded maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax), mean SUV (SUVmean), metabolic tumor volume (MTV) and total lesion glycolysis (TLG) of the tumor and the following parameters of each patient, including gender, age, stage, nasal lymphoma infiltration range, extranasal lymphoma infiltration, lymph node involvement, bone marrow involvement and several clinical parameters. Survival curves were obtained using Kaplan-Meier analysis and compared using log rank test, followed by multivariate analysis using Cox proportional hazards model to assess the independent effects of these parameters on overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) of ENKTL.Results: Survival analysis found that the following parameters were predictive for 2-y OS: MTV (P Conclusions: Our study demonstrated that bone marrow involvement and Ann Arbor staging based on 18F-FDG PET/CT to be the significant independent prognostic factor of both OS and PFS.