Diseases information. Disorders. Treatment. » Nuclear Medicine

Screening for thyroid cancer

Jammy B. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:28:45 +0000

Screening for thyroid cancer in patients with a history of head and neck irradiation. These patients are getting into their 50s and 60s. These are patients who had radiation for the thymus or acne or whatever benign diseases that we were zapping them for.
Implications of test results in the nodules and masses. Basically, we’re looking for whether the nodule or the mass is hyperfunctioning or hypofunctioning. If it’s hyperfunctioning, it only has a 3% incidence of being malignant. You don’t even have to touch these people. You can watch them. Followup palpation, that sort of thing. But basically if it’s a hot nodule or hyperfunctioning nodule, you’ve pretty much ruled out malignancy. On the other hand, if you have a hypofunctioning nodule, 15-25% of cases will be malignant. It’s even higher if they have a history of radiation to the neck. These people need a fine needle aspiration and you might as well just do it early instead of later. We had a case recently where a young man was delayed for two months before he got his fine needle aspiration which was entirely too long. He had a mass that was about this big and it would have taken two seconds to get a needle into that thing. Canadian cialis online pharmacy.
Toxic nodules can cause hyperthyroidism. Usually you see complete suppression of the rest of the thyroid gland. Usually you have already performed thyroid function tests and you already have an idea if they are hyperthyroid. Function nodules are autonomous if they continue to produce hormone despite TSH suppression. They are very easily treated with radioactive iodine because all of the radiation goes right to that overfunctioning nodule and wipes it out. The rest of the gland is protected because there is such a low TSH, it’s not taking up any radiation. Very easy to treat with radioactive iodine.
Multinodular goiters are very common in middle aged females. They are usually benign. They are usually not toxic. They’re usually euthyroid but if they are toxic and they do need treatment, you could go with radioactive iodine or PTU, again for the hyperthyroidism of multinodular goiters. A scan is a good idea in a multinodular goiter, mostly because you want to rule out a dominant cold nodule, again, which might indicate malignancy. Generic pharmacy
Graves’ disease, everybody knows about. Subacute thyroiditis, remember, is an inflammatory process. It’s transient. They’re just releasing all this preformed hormone. There’s a suppressed TSH and a high T4 or a high T3 and it looks just like the hyperthyroidism of Graves’ disease.
One thing that’s kind of come up in the past few years is that the TSH tests have gotten much more sensitive so I’m seeing more and more patients with normal free T4 and suppressed TSH. The first thing that you want to do in that case is check the T3. 10% of the cases of hyperthyroidism are where only the T3 is elevated. Buy Cymbalta online without prescription.
The second thing that you want to do is get a thyroid uptake and scan. If their uptake is high, then they are truly hyperthyroid and we can go ahead and start treating them. Generally, we want to either watch these patients very closely or go ahead and start treating them because eventually they are going to develop hyperthyroidism. So you can either get on the bandwagon early or you can wait until they are really symptomatic. Generally, though, they are somewhat symptomatic because you’ve already tested them for their TSH.
Patients that are asymptomatic get a routine screening TSH. Your call is as good as mine. I’d call up my local endocrinologist and see what they would recommend in terms of treatment but that is an issue that’s come up in the last few years.
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What do we look for?

Jammy B. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:19:25 +0000

What do we look for? Basically what this test is looking for is the urease – the enzyme that’s produced by the H. pylori itself – and that cleaves to give them radioactive urea. It cleaves the urea, you get radioactive carbon dioxide, they breathe it out into the balloon and we look for the radioactive carbon dioxide.
Remember when you treat H. pylori, you are committing yourself to a multi drug antibiotic regimen. I’m sure it’s not quite as bad as TB, which we just heard about, but it’s still not an innocuous set of drugs. Flagyl, in particular, can have quite a few side effects. It’s also, for many weeks. Viagra professional I don’t know about you but I had to be on a multi drug regimen once and even knowing just how critical it was to take all those drugs as scheduled it was still very difficult for me to do that. Don’t forget to use your acid reducers or your H2 antagonists to also treat the ulcer while you’re treating the H. pylori and it is critical to prevent recurrence of the ulcer.
Again, other diagnostic modalities. We discussed the indication for the CLO test. The C13 breath test is very similar to ours. It’s not a radioactive version of carbon but it’s a heavier version and you use mouse spectroscopy in order to identify the carbon-13 labeled CO2. Because of that mouse spectroscopy, it is a more time consuming test. I understand they charge in the same ballpark as our study. Purchase viagra super active at canadian pharmacy.
Serum antibodies are helpful. However, they remain positive for quite awhile after you’ve even treated the infection. It does not necessarily indicate acuity and it’s particular poor for following response to therapy.
HIDA scans. I’m going to just briefly tell you a little bit about gall bladder ejection fraction. Again, think of the gall bladder as basically a muscular sac. It needs to relax, dilate, contain the bile, store the bile, and then upon stimulation by CCK, it needs to then contract and eject the bile into the small intestine. So if it cannot do that, that evidence of dysfunction has been associated with chronic cholecystitis. Patients that have right upper quadrant pain and a low ejection fraction who do have a cholecystectomy, 90% of them have complete and permanent resolution of their right upper quadrant pain. I personally know a number of patients whose only abnormal study was the ejection fraction on the HIDA scan.
Thyroid imaging is about as far as I’m probably going to get and I just want to skim over it and reiterate the indications. Evaluation of the etiology of hyperthyroidism and planning therapy for hyperthyroidism. Basically what we want to before we give anybody radioactive iodine is we want to be sure that they don’t have subacute thyroiditis. A completely reversible process and the only test that you can do for that is a radioactive iodine uptake. Evaluation of thyroid nodules or goiter or neck mass and, again, what you are doing here basically is ruling out malignancy. That’s always a key issue if you are at all tuned into the legal ramifications of what we do. Levitra pharmacy blog

Bone scans

Jammy B. — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:59:26 +0000

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Bone scans are also very helpful in patients with low back pain. Now, I know you see a lot of low back pain and I don’t expect you to refer patients for a bone scan in every case but somebody who is refractory to therapy, who just isn’t getting better, whose plain films are normal or potentially whose plain films demonstrate spondylolisthesis, a bone scan with SPECT would be indicated in those cases. It’s particularly helpful if it’s an occupational incident, shall we say, or it’s an accident in perhaps a legal case, it is very helpful to get a bone scan. Again, it is the most sensitive thing that we have out there. Once we add SPECT, it is by far the most sensitive diagnostic test we have available. If you have a legal case or an occupational therapy type case and you have a negative bone scan, that can be very helpful.
In the adolescent, spondylolisthesis may or may not be causing the back pain. So if you see a plain film finding of spondylolisthesis, you need to find out if it’s actually causing problems at this time. If there’s an acute problem, if there is bony remodeling, that’s what the bone scan will help you with. Cialis super active new medication at canadian mall.
In the vast majority of patients, we will see what we call increased uptake or bony remodeling, which is what our bone scan looks for, within 24 hours. In the elderly, however, it might take up to a week. Keep in mind that we should use it after the x-ray. The age of injury can also be judged. So if you have a nice little old lady who you are assuming is osteoporotic with a compression fracture on her chest x-ray and you have no idea how long it’s been there and now she is complaining of bone pain, you need to know, “Is this acute or is this chronic?”, a bone scan is very helpful.
This is a little bit redundant from a prior study. I just want to reiterate that SPECT does improve both the sensitivity and the specificity for bone and joint related pain. Generic viagra online pharmacy erectile dysfunction treatment.
This is called the PY test. This is a test looking for H. pylori infection. Generally, patients with ulcers, if they are concomitantly infected with H. pylori, their ulcers will recur very rapidly despite appropriate H2 antagonist therapy. There are two clinical indications. One is to make the diagnosis and the other is to document the successful therapy of this disease.
Now, if you are going to be doing an upper endoscopy anyway on this patient to look for the ulcer or for whatever reasons, you don’t need to get this test. You should just do a CLO test. The CLO test is where you take a little biopsy of the ulcer and it’s a $50 test and you get very quick results. It is very little additional cost on top of the endoscopy. On the other hand, if you are going to do an endoscopy just to do a CLO test, that’s a $2000 study and we’ll do this for $200.
This is a very quick test. The patients come in, swallow a capsule, wait 10 minutes, they breathe into a little bag and they’re gone. It’s very fast. I think it’s really quite inexpensive. It’s one of the least expensive things that I do anyway. There are quite a few medications that will interfere with the test and the way to remember this is they don’t get any antibiotics for one month, they don’t get any Prilosec or omeprazole for one week and there is no H2 antagonist for one day prior to the test. These will all cause false negative tests because you are, to some degree, treating the disease.
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Occult fractures

Jammy B. — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:52:11 +0000

Occult fractures. Occult fractures, by definition, are not seen on the plain films. If you ever suspect a fracture, you always start with a plain film. They are the least expensive, most cost effective and most helpful study if they are positive. If they are negative and your clinical suspicion remains high, like our nice little osteoporotic lady with severe right hip pain that we did last Friday who had two pelvic fractures of the sacroiliac joint and then in through the sacrum, you need to go on and do a bone scan. Canadian pharmacy viagra 50 mg or 100 mg without prescription.
Osteomyelitis. Typically this is the diabetic patient with a lovely ulcer that’s just eroding through the skin and pretty much down to the bone and you’re trying to decide if all they have is a cellulitis or if they actually also have osteomyelitis and need a longer term of intravenous antibiotics.
Once you get into what I like to consider traumatized bone, like the diabetic foot, someone who can have some pretty bad neuropathic changes (Charcot joints), your specificity of your bone scan will decrease. Then we may well need to recommend additional imaging, for example, with a labeled white blood cell study. If those white blood cells are only in the soft tissues it’s cellulitis. If they are nice and focal right there in the bone, that’s going to be an osteomyelitis.
If it’s untraumatized bone, let’s say it’s the honeymooner that stepped on a sea urchin spine in Hawaii five weeks ago and has persistent foot pain even though you don’t see any definite abnormalities on the outside, then the sensitivity and specificity for bone scanning is about 95%. So it’s really very good in untraumatized bone. Buy amoxicillin online.
Painful joint prostheses. This is generally someone who has had a joint replaced. Usually they have an initial improvement in their pain in that joint and then it starts to deteriorate again. It can be much later. The incidence of loosening in prosthetic joints is actually quite high. I don’t want to quote a number but it is significant. So, again, bone scans can be very helpful there. If you’re doing the bone scan very close to the surgery, then we can get some false positives or we can be a little wishy-washy on the interpretation saying, “Post surgical changes. Maybe osteomyelitis”. Then, again, we might ask for a white blood cell study in that case.
Hip pain. The main thing that makes it important for you to do a bone scan early in hip pain is if you’re worried about aseptic necrosis. You want to get these people prior to irreversible changes and do surgery and hopefully reestablish the blood flow to that hip. Human Growth Hormone pharmacy – cheap canadian medications.
Osteomyelitis and septic arthritis are often in the differential diagnosis in children or in infants with hip pain or who are refusing to bear weight on an extremity. Again, you need to rule out aseptic necrosis very early on. Early on, the plain films in aseptic necrosis are going to be normal because it’s going to take quite some time before the bone loses enough calcium and starts to collapse. Those are the findings that you will see on the plain films.

The other thing that is interesting about prostate cancer

Jammy B. — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:53:56 +0000

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The other thing that is interesting about prostate cancer is that we now have two different kinds of agents that we can use for treating prostate cancer with extensive bone metastases. What we are actually treating is the bone pain itself. These are two relatively new agents. One is called strontium, also known as Metastron, and the other is called Quadramet. They are both agents which go to newly forming bone. You’re going to see newly forming bone around any bone marrow metastases and then you deliver a very high, focal dose of radiation to the metastases themselves and it’s very effective for the bone pain. Remember prostate cancer patients live a long time, even when it’s fairly end stage. Bone pain is the main thing that affects their quality of life. So bone scans are also done to determine whether a patient is a candidate for this type of therapy. Pheromone cologne for men.
With lung cancer, some people do it for the initial staging of all patients with lung cancer. Some restrict it to only patients with bone pain. Again, you would do it with anyone who develops bone pain who has that diagnosis.
Other malignancies. In general the rule of thumb is if the patient is symptomatic with bone pain. Most other malignancies are much less likely to metastasize to the bone. Osteosarcoma. It’s used for staging and for routine followup.
How do you interpret the results of a bone scan that’s been done for metastatic disease? One thing you always have to remember is that the bone scan is the most sensitive study, more sensitive than radiographs, but it is less specific. We often recommend plain films to either confirm a benign cause of lung pain or to confirm a malignant metastasis. If the x-ray does that, if it confirms a benign cause or confirms the metastasis, you’re fine. If it’s normal, you have to presume that that’s due to metastatic disease and again that’s because the bone scan is more sensitive than the plain films. Viagra professional – you can get pleasure!
MRI is very good for looking at the bone marrow. Therefore it’s very good at looking at bone metastases because they generally spread through the bone marrow. Thin cut CT is better for looking at the bone cortex so you might want to use that if there is a suspicion of a fracture. You may even need a biopsy. Let’s say you have somebody who’s just been diagnosed with cancer, has a single lesion on the bone scan, the plain films are normal and you need to know if they are Stage IV or not. Then you would really have to go to a biopsy. Followup bone scans are also something that can potentially help you if you don’t need to make an immediate treatment decision.
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Some other nononcologic indications for bone scans include stress fractures. Again, what you’re looking at is stress fractures versus shin splints. This is that young athlete, that fanatical person that exercises for hours and hours every day, they’re training for something, they’re on the high school track team or whatever it is and these people do not want to stop. They want you to tell them that their pain is due to something that is reversible and they can continue to exercise. With stress fractures, that’s not possible. These require six weeks of inactivity in order to heal. X-rays are often, if not always, normal. Shin splints, on the other hand, will usually recuperate in a very short period of time and the patient can resume their exercise.

Cardiologist specific clinical indications

Jammy B. — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:48:36 +0000

Now, we’re getting into some more cardiologist specific clinical indications. Evaluating extent or significance of known coronary artery disease. Typically these patients have a stenosis between 50 and 70%. Remember, when we look at a coronary angiogram all you’re looking at is the lumen of that blood vessel and this is a completely subjective call by the cardiologist as to just how much of a stenosis there is there. Generally, coronary disease is defined as a greater than 50% stenosis. But a lot of cardiologists won’t do anything to something that’s less than 70% because they don’t think it is functionally significant. So our study will help you decide whether it’s functionally significant or not. Order Abilify without prescription.
Patients who have had PTCAs are something we need to watch very carefully. The main reason is that 30% of them will restenose in the first year after PTCA. That is a high number and these patients need to be carefully monitored. If you have somebody that had PTCA three months ago and they start having their typical chest pain again, you’d better be pretty suspicious about restenosis of their graft. Again, this is a noninvasive way of double checking whether there is restenosis. Again, extent of severity would be relative in this condition as well because if there is only a mild restenosis nothing will be done about it. If there’s a large area of severe stenosis, they might consider bypass grafting or repeat PTCA or, these days, stent placement. Again, detection of myocardial viability is often a question and you can use either thallium or PET scanning. Canadian online pharmacy – viagra, levitra, cialis.
Bone scans. Detection and followup of skeletal metastases is probably the number one indication that I see bone scans for. The cancers that are the most relevant, unfortunately, which are also very common are breast, lung and prostate cancer. Now, typically with breast cancer, anybody that’s Stage III or above on their initial diagnosis needs a bone scan, anybody at any stage who has bone pain and for the followup of anyone who develops bone pain. It’s always indicated in prostate cancer and the reason is that prostate cancer metastases are notorious for being painless. So use this for the initial staging in all patients and for routine asymptomatic followup.

One of the other things

Jammy B. — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 22:38:33 +0000

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One of the other things it can do for you is tell you if there are other vessels involved. In other words, did this gentleman have single vessel disease? He’s infarcted what he’s going to infarct. End of story. Now we know he has coronary disease. Let’s work on his risk factors but we don’t have to be incredibly aggressive about looking for another stenosis to angioplasty or perhaps bypass. Versus does this man have three vessel disease and he’s only infarcted one of his territories and we need to be very aggressive.
It can also tell you the size of the infarct. Obviously the larger the infarct, the more at risk the patient is. The more proximal the stenosis is in the vessel, the larger the infarct will be and, again, if ischemia is present, you may want intervention.
Consider in this patient population also doing a thallium scan. The times you do a thallium scan is when you’re looking for something called viable myocardium. Basically, viable myocardium are cells that have been damaged by the hypoxia but have retained their cell wall integrity and enough of the myocardial cell functions that if you resupply or reestablish the oxygen supply they will completely recover and start to contract normally again. Cheap soma online pharmacy. Typically the patient has a known stenosis, a contractility abnormality – there’s hypo or akinesia or perhaps dyskinesia – in that same territory. Usually they have a low ejection fraction and that is somebody who you might want to reestablish the blood flow to that area of infarct to see if you can salvage that myocardium. This is what PET scanning is really very good for and if you have that available to you I would strongly consider it because it is more specific as well as more sensitive than a thallium scan. Canadian cialis at cheap pharmacy.
Now I forgot to discuss the efficacy of current therapy. Here’s something that you all would be very interested in. Let’s not forget that this thing called “silent ischemia” or “silent infarct” is real. A lot of patients do not have the typical chest pain syndrome and you cannot use symptoms alone in order to monitor the efficacy of therapy. Again, really what you are looking for is extent and severity of ischemia on a current medical regimen. This is one of those times when you definitely don’t need to change the patient’s heart medications prior to getting the study going and, if you can, try to go with an exercise treadmill type stress test. That way you know just how far the patient can go and just how protective those drugs are that you have them on.

Myocardial perfusion

Jammy B. — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:52:18 +0000

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You can use myocardial perfusion imaging with a treadmill stress test and that will give you very important information. It will tell you how in shape this patient is. Do they have ST changes at 12 minutes or do they have them at 2 minutes? Having them at 2 minutes is a risk factor in itself even if we don’t ever document ischemia on our images. On the other hand, you can also use adenosine or pharmacologic stress. Often these patients have concurrent asthma, COPD or peripheral vascular disease that prevents them from exercising adequately. Remember, you always need to check and make sure the patient had adequate exercise prior to interpreting the perfusion imaging.
Sort of the next step down, I think, possibly some family practitioners will and some people will not still be seeing this level of patient. These are patients who already have known coronary disease and who have recurrent chest pain. Remember, you can still have gastroesophageal reflux disease or PE in somebody who has coronary artery disease.
Risk stratification after acute MI. Again, some family practitioners are going to be caring for these patients. Others will have already referred the patient off to a cardiologist but there are a number of ways in which this study can help you in the post myocardial infarction patient. In those patients who have no ischemia on this study, less than 1% will have a coronary event in the next one year. That is excellent prognostic information. It can make everybody feel a lot more comfortable that there is no significant ischemia that needs to be treated aggressively at this time.

Nuclear Medicine

Jammy B. — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:47:53 +0000

Myocardial perfusion imaging is a very useful test when looking for coronary artery disease. Bone scans, a number of indications there. A very common test. H. pylori breath test is a new test study that’s being used to diagnose H. pylori because as everybody realizes, that needs to be completely eradicated. Hepatobiliary imaging. There’s a new variation on this theme. It’s called cholecystokinin and we actually look at a gall bladder ejection fraction, sort of like a left ventricular ejection fraction. If the gallbladder does not contract sufficiently, that’s an indication of disease. Thyroid imaging and VQ scans will be discussed.
Myocardial perfusion imaging. The diagnosis of coronary artery disease is critical. Cardiolyte is the best agent for this. There are three different agents that we can use. What everyone thinks of when they think of myocardial perfusion imaging is thallium scans. There’s also a newer agent called Myoview and on the top, the whole category of agents, the most common of which is cardiolyte imaging. They all pretty much do the same thing. I would leave it up to your nuclear medicine physician or radiologist to decide which agent to use. Health care articles.
I prefer to use cardiolyte in the diagnosis of coronary artery disease because you can get not only a left ventricular ejection fraction which can be helpful in more advanced cases, but you can also look at focal wall motion. Basically what that does is improves the specificity of the test. Canadian viagra can help achieve an erection. So if you have a young, slightly overweight female with large breasts, we could have an attenuation artifact which could mimic an LID infarct. Of course, we don’t want to make the diagnosis of LID infarct when really it’s just an artifact from the body habitus and cardiolyte helps us differentiate between those two.
Another time that myocardial perfusion imaging can really help you out is when you have discrepancies between your stress test results and your clinical impression. Again, if you have a positive exercise treadmill study which is very common in, say, younger females where there’s a low incidence of coronary disease, that’s where you’d want to add our test and we will improve the specificity of your findings.
Vice versa, you have an older man who has the classic symptoms and he has a negative stress test. Remember stress testing has a rather low sensitivity. You might need to increase you specificity by adding myocardial perfusion imaging studies.
Often, abnormal baseline EKGs are present that make interpretation of the stress test very difficult. Examples are left ventricular hypertrophy, the changes of digitalis, left bundle branch block. Another indication would be the presurgical screening of a high risk patient. For example, somebody that has peripheral vascular disease. I imagine a lot of family practitioners are asked by the surgeons to clear somebody medically prior to an operation and this is an excellent test to use. Cheap provigil online pharmacy.