Influence of the heterogeneity of P-glycoprotein expression on technetium-99m-MIBI uptake in breast cancer.

Abstract

Due to the heterogeneous expression of p-glycoprotein, both immunohistochemistry and 99mTc-MIBI scintigraphy may yield confounding results by contrasting with one another if the presence or absence of p-glycoprotein is not extensively explored. Although our data confirmed that 99mTc-MIBI imaging is useful in the determination of the presence of multidrug resistance in patients with breast cancer, the issue of heterogeneous expression of the antigen should be further investigated when unexpected results are obtained.