An international team of cancer specialists and imaging experts, including University of Iowa radiologist Malik Juweid, MD, has developed standardized guidelines for assessing how patients with lymphoma respond to treatment.

The revised guidelines are expected to have major implications for patient management and will give clinicians worldwide uniform criteria to compare and interpret clinical trials of lymphoma treatments.

.The new guidelines build on criteria for treatment response assessment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma published in 1999. Although those criteria have been widely adopted, recent advances—including increased use of positron emission tomography scans and immunohistochemistry—prompted the revisions.

Juweid co-chaired the committee that developed the recommendations for performing and interpreting P.E.T. scans in lymphoma response assessment.

“This is the first time that standardized guidelines have been recommended on an international level,” Juweid said. “These revised criteria are the first for any cancer type to formally integrate functional imaging with P.E.T. into the more conventional response assessment using clinical, laboratory, and radiological measures.”

The recommendations appeared in the online issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

—Jennifer Brown