Thyroid cancer radioactive iodine treating

When used at doses that defiver 150 Gy or more (<150p,Gi I/g of thyroid tissue), radioactive iodine is an effective cure for Graves disease and is associated with few acute side-effects. Potential long-term adverse side-effects, including thyroid cancer and genetic damage, have yet to be observed in individuals treated as children or adolescents with 1. 

With the production of artificial radioactive substances in 1934. the field of nuclear medicine was established. In 1937, the first radioactive isotope was used to treat a person with leukemia at the University of California at Berkeley. Major strides in the use of radioactivity in medicine occurred in 1946, when a radioactive iodine isotope was successfully used to diagnose thyroid function and to treat hyperthyroidism and thyroid cancer. Radioactive substances are now used to produce images of organs, such as liver, spleen, thyroid gland, kidneys, and the brain, and to detect heart disease. Today, procedures in nuclear medicine provide information about the function and structure of every organ in the body, which allows the nuclear physician to diagnose and treat diseases early. 

Th Toid cancers are often treated with radioactive iodine because the thyroid gland preferentially absorbs iodine. 

Iodine is an essential nutrient element required for thyroid gland. It is added to salt and to animal feeds for the prevention of goiter. In medicine it is used as a therapeutic reagent for the treatment of various thyroid-related diseases. It also is used as an antiseptic. Radioactive isotopes of iodine are used for treating thyroid cancer, heart diseases including tachycardia, and as a tracer for diagnosing certain diseases. 

Almost all elements found in nature can now be made radioactive. Radioactive potassium and phosphorus are used as tracers to measure how effectively plants take up fertilizer from soil. Radioactive iodine is applied in nuclear medicine to diagnose and treat thyroid problems. Radiation treatment for cancer therapy uses radioactive cobalt, which is made by irradiating ordinary cobalt with neutrons. 

Often the amount of administered radioactivity has been used as the criterion to determine whether a patient should be hospitalized or not. T-treated patients, however, do not have the same iodine kinetics. The clearance of from ablated thyroid cancer patients is much faster than from patients treated for hyperthyroidism. The calculations by Coover et al. (2000) enable the nuclear medicine physician to determine the maximum dose to be prescribed to each individual patient. There is a wide... 

Radioactive iodine can cause thyroid problems, and help diagnose and treat thyroid problems. Long-term (chronic) exposure to radioactive iodine can cause nodules, or cancer of the thyroid. However, once thyroid cancer occurs, treatment with high doses of 1-131 may be used to treat it. Doctors also use lower doses of 1-131 to treat overactive thyroids. 

One form of radiation therapy is isotope therapy, in which a labeled substance that is known to accumulate in the defective organ is introduced into the body. The radiopharmaceutical may be a compound labeled with radioactivity or a radioactive isotope that has the tendency to accumulate. The most-used application of isotope therapy is the use of radioactive iodine I to treat hyperthyroidism and cancer of the thyroid. The rest of the treatments are covered by treatment of blood illnesses with compounds containing radioactive phosphorus or the treatment of joints with the yttrium isotope... 

Knowing about half-lives is importeuit because it enables you to determine when a sample of radioactive material is safe to handle. The rule is that a sample is saie when its radioactivity has dropped below detection limits. And that occurs at 10 half-lives. So, if radioactive iodine-131 = 8 days) is injected into the body to treat thyroid cancer, it ll be gone in 10 half-lives, or 80 days. 

We define the half-life of a radioactive nucleus as the time it takes for one-half of the nuclei in a sample to decay. The half-life is independent of the amount of sample. In some cases, you can find the half-life of a radioactive sample by directly observing how long it takes for one-half of the sample to decay. For example, you find that 1.000 g of iodine-131, an isotope used in treating thyroid cancer, decays to 0.500 g in 8.07 days. Thus, its half-life is 8.07 days. In anotho- 8.07 days, this sample would decay to one-half of 0.500 g, or 0.250 g, and so forth. Figure 21.11 shows this decay pattern. 

Radioactive isotopes are commonly used in cancer therapy, usually to eliminate any malignant cells left after surgery. Cobalt-60 is most often used y-rays from this source are focused at small areas where cancer is suspected. Certain types of cancer can be treated internally with radioactive isotopes. If a patient suffering from cancer of the thyroid drinks a solution of Nal containing radioactive iodide ions ( T or I), the iodine moves preferentially to the thyroid gland. There the radiation destroys mahgnant cells without affecting the rest of the body. 

Iodine-131 is a radioactive isotope that has important medical uses. Small doses of iodine-131 are used for treating hyperthyroidism (overactive thyroid) and larger doses are used for treating thyroid cancer. Iodine-131 is administered to patients in the form of sodium iodide capsules that contain I ions. Determine the number of neutrons, protons, and electrons in a single ion. 

Medical x-rays provided one of the first applications of radioisotopes. In 1914, the wounded from World War 1 were pouring into Paris hospitals. Marie Curie converted a Renault car into the first mobile radiological unit and drove it from hospital to hospital. Radioisotopes are now widely used in medicine to diagnose, study, and treat illness. A physician can determine, for example, how and at what rate the thyroid gland takes up iodine by using iodine-131 as a radioactive tracer and cobalt-60 is used to kill rapidly growing cancer cells. 

---