Abstract
Positron emission tomography (PET) is widely used to detect cancers. The usual isotope for PET imaging of cancer is [(18)F]deoxyglucose. The premise of using [(18)F]deoxyglucose is that cancers are addicted to glucose (The Warburg effect). However, cancers are more severely addicted to methionine (The Hoffman effect). [(11)C]methionine PET (MET-PET) has been effectively used for the detection of glioblastoma and other cancers in the brain, and in comparison, MET-PET has been shown to be more sensitive and accurate than [(18)F]deoxyglucose PET (FDG-PET). However, MET-PET has been limited to cancers in the brain. The present report describes the first applications of MET-PET to cancers of multiple organs, including rectal, bladder, lung, and kidney. The results in each case show that MET-PET is superior to FDG-PET due to the methionine addiction of cancer and suggest that the broad application of MET-PET should be undertaken for cancer detection.