Forty one patients with Hodgkin’s disease (HD) were investigated with 67Ga Scintigraphy before and after the completion of chemotherapy. At the same time, all patients underwent computer tomography (CT) scans. Patients were followed up for 28-60 mont
hs (average 40 months). Patients were divided into groups according to the positivity or negativity of the gallium scan after chemotherapy: 32 patients had negative gallium scans, and 9 patients had positive gallium scans. In the gallium–negative group, 18.7% of the patients relapsed and 93.8% were alive at the end of the follow-up. In the gallium positive-group, 88.8% of the patients had recurrent disease and 77.7% were alive after intensive chemotherapy. There was a statistically significant difference in the overall survival between patients with positive gallium results and patients with negative gallium results (P= 0.0041). The disease-free survival differed significantly between patients with positive gallium scan and patients with negative gallium scan at the end of chemotherapy (P< 0.001). The relative risk of death was 4.3 and the relative risk of relapse was 12 for patients with positive gallium scans, in comparison to those with negative gallium scans. The positive and negative predictive value for predicting relapse was 89% and 81% respectively.
