Health And Pharmacy Blog

Most uses of radiation and radioisotopes emerge as spin off from the field of atomic energy. Many of these are unique. A few of them are indispensable. Medically needed radiation procedures save lives.

Currently, cancer hospitals diagnose about 800,000 new cancer cases annually. About two thirds of them need some form of radiation therapy. Using the technology developed by Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC), a private company fabricates cobalt-60 teletherapy unit appropriately named Bhabhatron; it is cheaper than the corresponding imported equipment. India supplied Bhabhatron II, an advanced unit to Vietnam under an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The Board of Research in Isotope Technology (BRIT) supplies 10 to 15 high intensity cobalt-60 sources to cancer hospitals annually for use in cobalt-60 teletherapy units which are the highly reliable work-horses to treat many forms of cancer in hundreds of thousands of patients nationwide.

Manual after-loading system fabricated by BRIT uses indigenously prepared caesium-137 tubes to treat uterus cancer. Radiation oncologists use Iridium-192 in the form of wires to treat breast cancer. Immuno deficient or Immuno-compromised patients cannot be given normal blood transfusion. They may suffer a serious condition called post-transfusion graft-versus-host-disease. The only way to avoid this condition is by eliminating the T-lymphocytes from the donor’s blood by exposing the blood to low dose irradiation before transfusion. BRIT has developed irradiators for this purpose and supplied 18 of them to various hospitals at Rs. 3 million per piece which is twice cheaper than an imported unit.

BRIT also periodically supplies technitium-99m, a radioisotope useful in 80% of diagnostic nuclear medicine procedures. Its popularity increased as it became available in portable generators. The Regional Centers for Radiopharmaceuticals (RCR) at Bangalore, Delhi, Kolkata and Dibrugarh extend life saving nuclear medicine services to thousand of patients; the RCR at Dibrugarh serves more than ten thousand patients per year.

Diagnostic radio-pharmaceuticals help to study static and dynamic functioning of various organs in the body. Specialists can image the organ by detecting the gamma radiation emitted from the radio-pharmaceuticals accumulated in the organ. The radio pharmaceuticals from BRIT  help to visualize the patterns of blood flow t the heart walls (myocardial perfusion scan), to evaluate the presence and extent of injury, to the heart following a heart attack (myocardial infraction, and to evaluate the results of bypass surgery or other procedures designed to restore blood supply to the heart.

Specialists use certain nuclear medicine procedures to evaluate brain abnormalities (tumors, memory disorders and seizures) and other central nervous system disorders and to map normal human brain. During 2007-08, hospitals bought from BRIT 14,000 consignments of ready-to-use radio-pharmaceuticals of iodine-131, phosphorus-32, chromium-51 and samarium-153.  Radioimmunoassay (RIA) is a sensitive radio-analytical technique to measure hormones, steroids, vitamin drugs, tumor markers and viral antigen. It is a very useful “test-tube” technique and does not involve administration of radioisotopes to the patient.

Over 300 immunoassay laboratories nation-wide received from BRIT, 9688 kits for radioimmunoassay and immunoradiometric assay during last year.  RIA is a very useful tool for diagnosing thyroid disorders. Estimation of fertility related hormones by radioimmunoassay is useful to detect pregnancy, to monitor the progress, to establish the gestational age and to manage complicated pregnancy properly.