RADIOBIOLOGY 

The Quarterly Journal of Nuclear Medicine 2000 Dicembre;44(4):340-6

Copyright © 2009 EDIZIONI MINERVA MEDICA

language: English

Radiation exposure and dosimetry in transplant patients due to Nuclear Medicine studies

El-Maghraby T. A. F. ^{1, 2}, Camps J. A. J. ¹, Gelenys J. ¹, Pauwels E. K. J. ¹

¹ From the 1Department of Radiology Division of Nuclear Medicine Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands 2 Department of Oncology and Nuclear Medicine Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, Egypt

Organ trans­plan­ta­tion is now an accept­ed meth­od of ther­a­py for treat­ing ­patients ­with end ­stage fail­ure of kid­neys, liv­er, ­heart or ­lung. Nuclear Med­i­cine may pro­vide func­tion­al ­data and ­semi-quan­ti­ta­tive param­e­ters. However, one seri­ous fac­tor ­that ham­pers the use of nucle­ar med­i­cine pro­ce­dures in trans­plant ­patients is the gen­er­al clin­i­cal con­cern ­about radi­a­tion expo­sure to the ­patient. This ­leads us to dis­cuss the effec­tive dos­es and radi­a­tion dosim­e­try asso­ciat­ed ­with radio­nu­clide pro­ce­dures ­used in the man­age­ment and fol­low-up of trans­plant ­patients. A sim­ple way to ­place the ­risk asso­ciat­ed ­with Nucle­ar Med­i­cine stud­ies in an appro­pri­ate con­text is to com­pare the ­dose ­with ­that ­received ­from a ­more famil­iar ­source of expo­sure ­such as ­from a diag­nos­tic X-ray pro­ce­dure. The radi­a­tion ­dose for the dif­fer­ent radio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals ­used to ­study trans­plant ­organ func­tion rang­es ­between 0.1 and 5.3 mSv ­which is com­par­able to X-ray pro­ce­dures ­with the excep­tion of 201Tl and 111In-anti­myo­sin. Thus Nucle­ar Med­i­cine stud­ies do not ­bear a high­er radi­a­tion ­risk ­than the ­often ­used X-ray stud­ies in trans­plant ­patients.