Hossein Jadvar, associate professor of radiology in the Keck School of Medicine of USC, is recruiting patients over the age of 21 who have metastatic prostate cancer for a research study funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Participants must be receiving either chemotherapy or androgen ablation treatment. The study involves the use of positron emission tomography (PET) and the chemical element fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG), a form of sugar marked with a radioactive substance.

FDG enables the PET scan to show if there are hot spots in the patient’s body where the sugar is being metabolized quickly – a possible indication of cancer, since cancerous cells use sugar more than healthy cells. The FDG PET will be combined with a standard CT scan in the same camera system to provide even more detailed information.

In this study, using FDG PET with a CT scan for evaluating metastatic prostate cancer is experimental. The researchers hope to discover whether this new imaging method is better for the measurement of treatment responses and prediction of patient outcomes than current methods.

The study began in November 2005 and will continue at least through October 2009.

For more information, contact Julia Quillen at (323) 442-5883.