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A bone scan or bone scintigraphy / s ɪ n ˈ t ɪ ɡ r ə f i / is a nuclear medicine imaging technique used to help diagnose and assess different bone diseases. These include cancer of the bone or metastasis, location of bone inflammation and fractures (that may not be visible in traditional X-ray images), and bone infection (osteomyelitis).
Osteolytic lesion at the bottom of the radius, diagnosed by a darker section that indicates a loss of bone density. An osteolytic lesion (from the Greek words for "bone" (ὀστέον), and "to unbind" (λύειν)) is a softened section of a patient's bone formed as a symptom of specific diseases, including breast cancer and multiple myeloma.
Bone metastases can be classified as osteolytic, osteoblastic, or both. Unlike hematologic malignancies which originate in the blood and form non-solid tumors, bone metastases generally arise from epithelial tumors and form a solid mass inside the bone. Primary breast cancer patients are particularly vulnerable to develop bone metastases. [2]
When a person has primary bone cancer, the cancer cells are bone cells that have become cancerous. According to the NHS , around 550 cases of primary bone cancer are diagnosed each year in the UK.
Depending on the size of these proteins, they may be excreted through the kidneys. Kidneys can be damaged by the effects of proteins or light chains. Increased bone resorption leads to hypercalcemia and causes nephrocalcinosis, thereby contributing to kidney failure. Amyloidosis is a distant third in the causation.
For a bone scan, the patient is injected with a small amount of radioactive material, such as 700–1,100 MBq (19–30 mCi) of 99m Tc-medronic acid and then scanned with a gamma camera. Medronic acid is a phosphate derivative which can exchange places with bone phosphate in regions of active bone growth, so anchoring the radioisotope to that ...
Nuclear medicine imaging studies are generally more organ-, tissue- or disease-specific (e.g.: lungs scan, heart scan, bone scan, brain scan, tumor, infection, Parkinson etc.) than those in conventional radiology imaging, which focus on a particular section of the body (e.g.: chest X-ray, abdomen/pelvis CT scan, head CT scan, etc.).
Physical effects of unnecessary diagnosis and treatment: All medical interventions have side effects. This is particularly true of cancer treatments. Surgery, radiation and chemotherapy all pose varying morbidity and mortality risks. Psychological effects: there is a burden for an individual simply being labeled as "diseased" (e.g. the burden ...