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When Ted Treves, MD, chief of Children's Hospital Boston's Division of Nuclear Medicine, was asked to participate in a
multicenter trial, he was surprised to find that it called for a radiopharmaceutical dose several times higher than that used at Children's for the same nuclear medicine procedure. Intrigued, he and his colleagues surveyed 13 pediatric hospitals in North America, inquiring about doses used in 16 different diagnostic exams. The findings revealed as much as a 20-fold variation in total dose administered and an overall lack of universally applied pediatric dosing standards. While the small amounts of radiation used pose a very small health risk, Dr. Treves and colleagues call for guidelines that take into account each child's unique profile. Infants and young children
metabolize radiopharmaceuticals
differently than adults, and the wide
range of disorders, body sizes, stages
of development and level of patient
cooperation all require customized dosing approaches, they say. "High doses that
do not improve diagnostic accuracy, or
low doses that do not permit adequate examination, should both be considered unnecessary radiation exposures," he says. (Journal of Nuclear Medicine, June)
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