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Laurent Arnaud, Gaëlle Bach, Delphine Zeitoun, Aurélie Drier, Philippe Cluzel, Philippe A. Grenier, Zahir Amoura, Julien Haroche, Whole-body MRI in Erdheim–Chester disease, Rheumatology, Volume 51, Issue 5, May 2012, Pages 948–950, https://doi.org/10.1093/rheumatology/kes016
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Sir, Erdheim–Chester disease (ECD) is a rare form of non-Langerhans' cell histiocytosis first described by Jakob Erdheim and William Chester in 1930 [1]. By September 2011, no more than 400 distinct cases have been reported in the medical literature.
ECD may be considered a truly systemic disease, as its wide clinical spectrum includes skeletal, CNS, cardiovascular, pulmonary, retroperitoneal, hypophyseal, sinusal, adrenal, orbital and cutaneous manifestations. The clinical course of ECD is largely dependent on the extent of the disease, with a poorer prognosis when CNS or cardiovascular systems are involved. It is thus of major importance to assess disease extent with accuracy, and several imaging techniques such as technetium-99 bone scintigraphy, FDG-PET scan, CT scanner, MRI have been evaluated in this indication [1].
During the past few years whole-body MRI (WB-MRI) has progressively emerged as an interesting alternative to standard multimodal imaging strategies in oncology. WB-MRI has shown promising results for the staging of solid tumours and multiple myeloma, and offers the advantage of highly resolutive, non-irradiating whole-body coverage within a single examination. As WB-MRI is now increasingly recognized as an efficient total body imaging concept, we postulated that its use could be of great interest to assess disease extension in ECD.
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