“Is nuclear medicine toxic to the lungs?”
I am a 29 year old male. I want to know is nuclear medicine toxic to the lungs?
3 Answers
no
There are very few tracers that go to the lung. Xenon which is use to test ventilation has a very short effective half life. That is there is very little time spent in the lung. Other tracers that go to the lung have a 6 hour half life and do not cause much radiation. Some of the older tracers did cause more radiation in the lungs. The tracers used for imaging lung cancers have a 2 hour half life and the radiation dose is not considered excessive. The simple answer to the question is no.
No, never...UNLESS (to be absolutely complete in this answer):
One makes the now unheard of mistake of treating thyroid cancer which has spread to the lungs with too high a dose of a specific radioactive material. (That is NOT lung cancer, but thyroid cancer metastatic to the lungs!). We always prevent that by easily measuring the safe dose to be delivered before giving it. We teach that to every doctor learning Nuclear Medicine, supervise these therapies the doctor-in-training performs, and test him/her for this knowledge before allowing that doctor to practice Nuclear Medicine! I doubt there are any Nuclear Medicine practitioners in the U.S. who do not understand this. We have known this since the 1960's, and we test for this safety information easily and safely on all such patients before treatment. Very large amounts of external beam radiation (coming from equipment producing focused radiation outside the body for killing cancer) are carefully aimed at the cancer inside the body, so as not to produce significant normal organ damage. This external beam radiation not what Nuclear Medicine does. Radiation oncologists do this. In the specialty of Nuclear Medicine, we administer, by mouth, artery or vein, cancer-specific radioactive treating drugs (specific for their cancer targets inside the body), giving no harmful radiation to the healthy lungs or rest of the body!
Edward B. Silberstein, M.A., M.D.
One makes the now unheard of mistake of treating thyroid cancer which has spread to the lungs with too high a dose of a specific radioactive material. (That is NOT lung cancer, but thyroid cancer metastatic to the lungs!). We always prevent that by easily measuring the safe dose to be delivered before giving it. We teach that to every doctor learning Nuclear Medicine, supervise these therapies the doctor-in-training performs, and test him/her for this knowledge before allowing that doctor to practice Nuclear Medicine! I doubt there are any Nuclear Medicine practitioners in the U.S. who do not understand this. We have known this since the 1960's, and we test for this safety information easily and safely on all such patients before treatment. Very large amounts of external beam radiation (coming from equipment producing focused radiation outside the body for killing cancer) are carefully aimed at the cancer inside the body, so as not to produce significant normal organ damage. This external beam radiation not what Nuclear Medicine does. Radiation oncologists do this. In the specialty of Nuclear Medicine, we administer, by mouth, artery or vein, cancer-specific radioactive treating drugs (specific for their cancer targets inside the body), giving no harmful radiation to the healthy lungs or rest of the body!
Edward B. Silberstein, M.A., M.D.
