Question: Is there any side effects of nuclear medicine?

Thomas Biggans answered on 15 Jun 2016:

There are no long term significant side effects to a nuclear medicine exam.

We do use radiation but it is a very small dose roughly equal to what you would get from the natural background radiation anyway so we’ve not found any side effects from using these low doses. Even so any nuclear medicine exam has to be justified which means there has to be a benefit for the patient to carry out the exam. This might be an accurate diagnosis of an illness or a follow up to see how the body is reacting to treatment.

The other thing we need to consider is allergies. Its very rare but a patient may be allergic to the drug we normally use so we make sure to find out any allergies when they’re booked in. In PET scans we use glucose which is a sugar so we have to be aware if our patient is diabetic and we test all patients blood sugar levels beforehand to make sure they’re in the normal range.

For pretty much all our patients, nuclear medicine provides a non-invasive, painless and side effect free way to diagnosis their condition as oppose to more invasive and perhaps uncomfortable methods.