Sacroiliitis detected by bone scintiscanning: A clinical, radiologic and scintigraphic follow-up study. Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases

SUMMARY Twenty-four patients had abnormal sacroiliac joints detected by quantitative sacroiliac scintigraphy but no radiological evidence of sacroiliitis on original investigation. We studied them again after intervals of 12 to 36 months. Four patients developed radiological change. Two young, HLA B27-positive men had undoubted ankylosing spondylitis, and a young woman had possible ankylosing spondylitis. A middle-aged man had changes that could be attributed to post-traumatic osteoarthrosis. Of the remaining 20 cases 15 had symptoms and signs suggestive of inflammatory disease of the axial skeleton (and peripheral arthropathy in 5 cases). The sexes were affected equally (8 females, 7 males), and only 2 of the 15 were B27-positive. The response to anti-inflammatory medication was generally good to excellent, and scintiscans tended to improve. Of the remaining 5 patients, 3 had mechanical or traumatic problems, and in 2 there was no explanation for the abnormal sacroiliac scintiscan. We conclude that quantitative sacroiliac scintigraphy may detect ankylosing spondylitis prior to the development of radiological change and that it can identify an organic basis for backache in patients with a spondylitis-like syndrome. The clinical circumstances must be taken into account, as scintigraphic abnormalities are not diagnostic of any specific disease entity. Bone scanning with 99mtechnetium-labelled stan-nous pyrophosphate is a sensitive means of detecting disease of the axial skeleton (Lentle et al., 1976). The technique is particularly applicable to the sacroiliac joints, where the uptake of radiotracer can be accurately quantitated in relation to the uptake by the central sacrum (Lentle et al., 1977a; Namey et al., 1977). The resultant sacroiliac joint to sacrum uptake ratios are clearly raised in a num-ber of diseases associated with sacroiliitis (Russel