image by: Chih-Yu Chen, Yong-Te Hsueh, Tsung-Yu Lan, Wei-Hsin Lin, Karl Wu and Rong-Sen Yang

HWN Suggests

Radioactive Man & Birthday Boy

I was never one to get overly excited about birthdays. Since turning 40, in particular, each passing year was not something I relished celebrating. That was before D-Day. My 44th birthday yesterday was quite different to all the ones that preceded it.

Someone asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I replied, joking (but not really), that all I wanted for my birthday is another birthday. It seems strange to me now that I used to regard birthdays with mild annoyance. It was as though their sole purpose was to reiterate how far removed I was from the full flush of youth, when health and optimism were in abundance.

It’s funny how it takes something like a diagnosis of cancer…

read full article

Articles of Interest

Bone Scans Still Overused After Prostatectomy

Too many low-risk patients getting scans...

Bone scans suggest early hominin 'Lucy' spent significant time in trees

Australopithecus afarensis arm bones were strong relative to leg bones; walking gait was likely inefficient.

How to Understand the Results of a Bone Scan

Look for "hot spots." The test results of a bone scan are considered normal when the radioactive dye is spread and absorbed evenly throughout your skeleton; however, a bone scan is considered abnormal when it shows darker colored "hot spots" in your bones. Hot spots show areas in your skeleton where an excess of dye accumulates, which could signify bone destruction, inflammation, fractures or tumor growth.

Life of a Professional Patient...Full Body Bone Scan

This week, I finally got the bone scan I’d been thinking about for about a year and a half.

The element that can make bones glow

Scientists spent years searching for Technetium, a chemical element that came, in time, to play a crucial role in medical diagnosis. So crucial in fact that a new search is already under way - to find a fresh and reliable source of the elusive metal substance, before current sources dry up.

Were Women’s Bone Scans Bone Scams?

Women are in such danger of osteoporosis they need regular bone scans. That was conventional medical “wisdom” since the first lucrative bone drug surfaced over a decade ago. But a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine reveals that the warnings don’t apply to 90 percent of women who have been getting the scans — and the bone drugs the scans were designed to sell — for no reason. How did this happen?

Resources

Bone Scan Index

Bone Scan Index (BSI) is an imaging biomarker that can support physicians to determine treatment response and to prognosticate survival in patients with advanced prostate cancer and bone metastases. The aim of this web site is to collate and present all the documentation, information and knowledge available about Bone Scan Index.

InsideRadiology.com

There are two parts to a bone scan – an injection of radiopharmaceutical into a vein (sometimes accompanied by ‘early’ imaging) and then ‘delayed’ imaging between 1–4 hours later.

Patient

In a bone scan, a radionuclide is used which collects in areas where there is a lot of bone activity (where bone cells are breaking down or repairing parts of the bone). So a bone scan is used to detect areas of bone where there is cancer, infection, or damage. These areas of activity are seen as 'hot spots' on the scan picture. This type of radionuclide bone scanning is also called bone scintigraphy. It is a totally different type of procedure to the DEXA bone scan which is used to measure density of bones in conditions such as 'thinning' of the bones (osteoporosis).

RadiologyInfo.org

Skeletal scintigraphy is a special type of nuclear medicine procedure that uses small amounts of radioactive material to diagnose and assess the severity of a variety of bone diseases and conditions, including fractures, infection, and cancer.