The Pros And Cons Of Nuclear Medicine

Nuclear medicine; a blessing or a curse? In today’s society cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. The term cancer is used to describe a disease that occurs when cells become more and more abnormal by continuously dividing and growing to form growths called tumors. This disease is not a local issue but impacts millions of people worldwide on a daily basis. Cancer treatments, however vary throughout the world, each with their own justifications and successes. The most common and widely used cancer treatments, especially in the United States are radiation and chemo therapy, which fall under what is known as “nuclear medicine.”

Nuclear medicine has been developed over the past 75 plus years and has been developed through

The chemical products consist of the name of the element in the periodic table to which a given nuclide belongs and the mass number of the nuclide. Each family includes many products with different concentrations and doses of a particular radionuclide. The radioactivity of a product is measured in curies (CI) which is equivalent to 3.7 X 10^10 nuclear decay per second (Li, 2015). The radioisotope most widely used medically is technetium-99m, which is utilized in about 80% of all nuclear medical treatments or about in 30 million patients worldwide each year, with 15 million in North America alone. This isotope is produced of artificial elements which makes it ideal for nuclear medicine. It has a half-life of six hours, which is long enough to examine metabolic processes, yet short enough to minimize radiation exposure to the patient. Technetium-99m decays by a process called "isomeric,” which emits gamma rays and low energy electrons; the process is pictured on the right (Yea,

For example, while other medical imaging equipment such as a CT or MRI (pictured to the right) allow for greater resolution, nuclear medical scans yield more useful information needed to make a diagnosis, prognosis and determine appropriate treatment (Freeman, 2012). Nuclear medicine is also less expensive and may have more precise information than exploratory surgery. Finally, nuclear medicine offers the potential to identify disease in its earliest stage, often before symptoms occur or abnormalities can be detected with other diagnostic tests. For patients undergoing a nuclear medical analysis, the radiation is generally administered internally. The radiopharmaceutical agent is given to the patient orally or intravenously, as opposed to the application of external beams used in radiotherapy. The radiopharmaceutical used emits ionizing radiation as it passes through the specific organs or tissues it is attracted to. This targeted radiation only travels a short distance, meaning damage to healthy neighboring tissues or organs is minimized. Usually, these therapies are performed on an outpatient basis and most patients can go home after