Prostate cancer patients with bone metastases benefit from repeated administration of radionuclide therapy, according to research published in the November issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine (Vol. 52:11, pp. 1721-1726).
In a retrospective study involving 60 patients with hormone-refractory prostate cancer, researchers found that post-treatment survival increased with the number of administrations of a novel rhenium-188 (Re-188) hydroxyethylidine diphosphonate (HEDP) radiopharmaceutical. Patients receiving one therapy added 4.5 months of life, those receiving two therapies added 10 months, and those receiving three or more therapies improved their survival by 15.7 months, according to lead author Dr. Hans-Jürgen Biersack of the University of Bonn and colleagues.
This radionuclide therapy also reduced pain, although no significant difference was found among the patients. The Re-188 HEDP treatments were developed for the study at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN.
![Overview of the study design. (A) The fully automated deep learning framework was developed to estimate body composition (BC) (defined as subcutaneous adipose tissue [SAT] in liters; visceral adipose tissue [VAT] in liters; skeletal muscle [SM] in liters; SM fat fraction [SMFF] as a percentage; and intramuscular adipose tissue [IMAT] in deciliters) from MRI. The fully automated framework comprised one model (model 1) to quantify different BC measures (SAT, VAT, SM, SMFF, and IMAT) as three-dimensional (3D) measures from whole-body MRI scans. The second model (model 2) was trained to identify standardized anatomic landmarks along the craniocaudal body axis (z coordinate field), which allowed for subdividing the whole-body measures into different subregions typically examined on clinical routine MRI scans (chest, abdomen, and pelvis). (B) BC was quantified from whole-body MRI in over 66,000 individuals from two large population-based cohort studies, the UK Biobank (UKB) (36,317 individuals) and the German National Cohort (NAKO) (30,291 individuals). Bar graphs show age distribution by sex and cohort. BMI = body mass index. (C) After the performance assessment of the fully automated framework, the change in BC measures, distributions, and profiles across age decades were investigated. Age-, sex-, and height-adjusted body composition reference curves were calculated and made publicly available in a web-based z-score calculator (https://circ-ml.github.io).](https://img.auntminnieeurope.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/05/body-comp.XgAjTfPj1W.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)
