Recent experiments conducted in vitro have documented a marked difference in the time course for D-[U-14C]glucose net uptake by pieces of pancreatic tissue versus isolated pancreatic islets. The present study aimed, therefore, at assessing whether the endocrine pancreas contributes to a detectable extent to the overall net uptake of 2-deoxy-2-[18F]fluoro-D-glucose (FDG) by the pancreatic gland. For this purpose, the radioactive content of the pancreas was compared to that of plasma, erythrocytes, liver, brain, hypophysis and parotid gland 3 min, 15 min and 240 min after the intravenous injection of FDG to both control rats and animals injected with streptozotocin and later treated with insulin or not. In the control rats, the radioactive content (cpm/mg wet wt.) of erythrocytes was always lower than that of liver. In other organs, it displayed the following hierarchy pancreas < parotid < hypophysis < brain, the absolute values being either lower (3 min) or much higher (240 min) than in liver. In the diabetic rats, whether treated with insulin or not, the radioactive content of erythrocytes, pancreas, brain, hypophysis and parotid gland, relative to the paired value found in liver, was equal or lower than that of control rats when the animals were hyperglycemic and equal or higher than that of control rats when the animals became hypoglycemic as the result of intensive insulin treatment. Even only 3 min after the injection of FDG, and despite persistent hyperglycemia in the streptozotocin-injected and insulin-treated rats, the pancreas/ liver paired ratio in radioactive content failed to be significantly lower in the diabetic animals than in control rats. These findings indicate that 2-deoxy-2-[18F]fluoro-D-glucose is not a suitable tool to detect any preferential labelling of insulin-producing cells, relative to acinar cells, at least when considering only the total radioactive content of the pancreatic gland.

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