Chest CT assists follow-upof head and neck cancer

A Taiwanese study suggests multislice CT chest studies should be routinely performed, especially during follow-up exams, for some head and neck cancer patients.

During a retrospective review, researchers from the Taipei Veterans General Hospital and colleagues found abnormalities in 79 of 270 chest scans from 192 patients with biopsy-proven head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. Ten of 15 indeterminate scans with small (< 1 cm) solitary pulmonary nodules showed disease progression on subsequent follow-up scans, which changed the patients' diagnoses to a malignant neoplasm of the lung.

The study was reported in the Archives of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery (2008;134[10]:1050-1054).