Title:The Role of Molecular Imaging in the Assessment of Cardiac Amyloidosis: State-of-the-Art
Volume: 14
Issue: 3
Author(s): Cristina Popescu*Irene A. Burger
Affiliation:
- Department of Nuclear Medicine, Kantonsspital Baden, Baden,Switzerland
Keywords:
Cardiac amyloidosis, light-chain, transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy, bone scintigraphy, SPECT, positron emission
tomography.
Abstract: Cardiac amyloidosis is a progressive infiltrative disease for which new treatments are
now available. As therapy should be started as early as possible to avoid complications such as restrictive
cardiomyopathy, arrhythmias and heart failure, a prompt and reliable diagnosis by means
of non-invasive tests would be highly warranted. Electrocardiography, echocardiography and cardiac
magnetic resonance imaging are all used in the evaluation of cardiac amyloidosis with varying
diagnostic and prognostic accuracy, but none of these modalities can effectively differentiate the
cardiac amyloid subtypes. We aim to highlight the most relevant findings in the literature of molecular
imaging in the assessment of patients with cardiac amyloidosis and to underline future clinical
perspective. We performed multiple searches using Pub-Med databases in order to find important
original articles on the role of molecular imaging in the assessment of patients affected by CA. Several
search terms were used, such as “cardiac amyloidosis”; “Light-chain amyloidosis”; “Transthyretin
amyloid cardiomyopathy”; “bone scintigraphy”; “single photon emission tomography” or
“SPECT”; “Positron emission tomography or PET”, and “cardiac imaging”. All radiopharmaceuticals
tracing cardiac amyloidosis were also included. Several studies about the role of SPECT with
bone-seeking tracer (47 articles) and innervation tracer (9 articles) in the work-up of CA, as well as
new PET amyloid-binding (14 articles) and bone radiotracer (4 articles) have been reviewed and
discussed. Molecular imaging represents a sensitive tool for early assessment of both amyloid burden
and cardiac innervation, to differentiate between subtypes and to monitor disease burden, disease
progression, and potential response to therapy.