Wednesday, September 21, 2022 | 1:00 a.m.
An average of two thousand benefits a year are performed in the Nuclear Medicine Service of the Madariaga de Posadas Hospital, of which 80% correspond to oncological pathologies.
This care center located in the Posadas Health Park is the only one in the province, in the public sphere, that has this service, which is of great importance in the provincial health system.
In this sense, doctor Gustavo Goral, responsible for the service, explained what nuclear medicine is. “This is a medical specialty where radiopharmaceuticals are used to carry out diagnostic studies or treatments of different pathologies through a gamma camera,” he pointed out.
The health worker highlighted the importance of the Nuclear Medicine Service in the public sphere of the province.
Likewise, he detailed the infrastructure and equipment with which they work. “We have a double-head gamma camera to carry out the studies and we also have other intraoperative equipment, which is used to support the surgeon in the identification of sentinel nodes, in different pathologies such as breast cancer and melanoma”, counted.
Along the same lines, he maintained that “in gamma camera studies, the patient is administered a radiopharmaceutical, which is selected according to the system that one wants to study, and a radioactive isotope, which emits gamma radiation, so that the emission of energy that the patient is emitting.
Goral also specified that the most common study they perform is the bone scan. “It is related to oncology, it is used for patient control and the search for bone metastases, breast, lung and prostate cancer”, he indicated.
In addition, he referred to other areas of application of nuclear medicine: “We apply it to cardiology in the evaluation of myocardial reality and cardiac ischemia. In pediatrics, we perform renal scintigrams in patients who had repeated urinary tract infections, so renal function is evaluated and whether the kidney was affected”.
Finally, he specified that the Nuclear Medicine Service of the Madariaga Hospital has all the corresponding qualifications.
“Nuclear medicine, at the national level, is regulated and supervised by an entity called the nuclear regulatory authority. For a nuclear medicine service to work, it must have the corresponding qualifications, either from the institution where it is located and from the human resource that operates. the equipment and manages the radioactive material”, he concluded.