Archive for the 'Nuclear Medicine' Category

12
Sep

One of the other things

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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.

27
Aug

Myocardial perfusion

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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.

11
Aug

Nuclear Medicine

Posted by Jammy B. | No Comments

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.