[Value of inflammation and bone scintigraphy in differential diagnosis of painful affections of small joints].

It was the aim of this study to evaluate different markers of inflammation such as 99mTc-labelled human immunoglobulin G and 99mTc-nanocolloid with respect to their ability to detect inflammatory or degenerative affections of small joints of hand and fingers. While conventional bone scanning reveals good agreement with clinical findings it is not well suited for screening of inflammatory processes due to its poor specificity. In small joints conventional three-phase bone scan with information of perfusion, bloodpool and accumulation is not suitable due to the small ROI, low count rate with high statistics. Therefore we used inflammatory markers to overcome this problem. Immunoglobulin G was true positive in case of inflammatory lesions in 69%, and false positive in case of degenerative lesions in 24%, while nanocolloid was true positive in 72% and false positive in 14%, respectively. Significant differences were found between markers of inflammation and the bone scanning agent while both inflammatory markers, immunoglobulin G and nanocolloid demonstrated significant correlation. While bone scanning tracers detect all kinds of joint affections, immunoglobulin G and nanocolloid accumulate preferentially in inflammatory joints and therefore might be useful to differentiate between inflammatory and degenerative lesions.