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DIAGNOSING PROSTATE PROBLEMS: BONE SCAN

A bone scan employs a nuclear-medicine body imaging technique in which a tiny amount of radioactive substance is injected into the bloodstream. When cancer spreads, it often spreads to the bone. When the bone is damaged, new bone is produced by the body's natural healing process. The bone scan can detect such a repair, alerting the urologist that cancer may have spread to the bone.

This diagnostic tool is considered by many urologists to be one of the most sensitive imaging techniques for identifying cancer in the bone. A very low dose of a radioactive substance is injected into the body, and it then filters its way into the skeletal structure and collects in areas where bone repair has occurred. After the substance is injected, there is a one-hour wait; the scanning process then takes about thirty minutes. The bone scan is painless and can be performed at an outpatient clinic. The main drawback of this test is diat if the patient has other problems such as arthritis, an infection, or a fracture, the bone scan cannot distinguish that damage from cancer damage.

As a side note, it is interesting that researchers have discovered the likely reason why prostate cancer so often spreads into the backbone: the bone tissue is rich in a protein that sharply stimulates the growth of prostate minor cells. The new work suggests that advanced prostate cancer may be amenable to treatment by blocking the activity of the stimulatory protein, a molecule called transferrin.

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