The urinary excretion of gallium-67 citrate in patients with neoplastic disease

The urinary excretion of gallium-67 has been studied in twenty-nine patients with considerable variation, ranging from 2.71 to 35.21 per cent of the injected dose in the first twenty-four hours. The data was analyzed to determine whether differences in excretion could be related to sex, age, plasma level, site or extent of disease but no significant relation could be found. While chemotherapy or radiotherapy has been shown to affect both the plasma clearance and protein binding they have no influence upon the urinary excretion of the isotope in this study. This study shows that all patients with high urinary excretion had bone metastasis from various types of primary tumour. Not all patients with bone metastasis have high urinary excretion of gallium-67. It would appear, however, from our limited series that patients with bone metastasis and normal urinary excretion of gallium-67 show a good response to treatment.