Specific benefits of AV tools for women
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| Beth Walsh, Editor, CMIO |
For example, breast cancer is a very complex disease yet common enough to affect one in eight women. If detected early enough, it can be cured, but one-third of women diagnosed with breast cancer eventually die of the disease. With multiple treatment strategies available, providing clinicians personalized information about a woman’s breast cancer may lead to better decision-making.
In the September issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, a group of South Korean researchers showed that pretreatment PET/CT imaging may shed light on a woman’s prognosis. Specifically, SUVmax offers a quantitative measure of lymph node involvement, a figure which appears to correlate with a woman’s risk of recurrence.
Unlike other measures of lymph node metastasis, PET/CT is noninvasive, and it offers a high degree of accuracy. Ultimately, it could lead to personalized treatment strategies based on a woman’s individual disease.
When it comes to heart disease, coronary CT angiography (CCTA) has been shown to have comparable diagnostic accuracy for both women and men for the detection of obstructive coronary stenosis. The higher specificity for women compared to traditional tests could lead to lower rates of unnecessary invasive tests, according to a study published in the July issue of the Journal of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography.
The study was a subgroup analysis of data from the ACCURACY trial, which is the first prospective multicenter trial for CCTA efficacy in patients without known coronary artery disease (CAD) or with intermediate prevalence of CAD, according to the study’s authors.
Results showed that for a patient-based model for stenosis at the 50 percent threshold, CCTA had a sensitivity and specificity of 96 percent and 78 percent, respectively, in men, and 90 percent and 88 percent, respectively, in women.
The authors stressed the role CCTA could play in limiting the sizeable proportion of women who are referred unnecessarily for invasive coronary angiography. Negative predictive values were 100 percent in men and 99 percent in women which “greatly supports the use of CCTA as an effective noninvasive test for accurately ruling out obstructive CAD,” the authors wrote. “CCTA may be a particularly useful noninvasive test for improving the rate of normalcy with invasive angiography among women.”
How is your facility applying personalized tools to deliver better patient care and do you have the IT infrastructure in place to support them? Please share your experience.
Beth Walsh
Editori, Clinical Innovation + Technology
bwalsh@trimedmedia.com
Beth Walsh,
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.