Nuclear Applications in Health Care by Steffen Groth

IAEA BULLETIN, 42/1/2000 N uclear applications in health care have a timehonoured record of being highly cost-effective in addressing important health problems such as malnutrition, cancer, infectious and circulatory diseases. Today they are providing lasting benefits for patients, physicians, medical researchers, and health care practitioners throughout the world. Many nuclear applications have become so wellestablished and documented that they are preferred to other methods. This is because they frequently provide unique medical information, or are among the least expensive approaches to a problem. Some applications -originally introduced as nuclear techniques -have developed into applications that have no “nuclear” component as such. (For example, many routine radioimmunoassays, or RIAs, have later developed into enzyme-linked immunoassay, or ELISA methods.) This development often occurred for reasons of high-speed automation and/or simplicity. At the same time, however, robustness and precision often were sacrificed. Nuclear applications in health care can be roughly divided into diagnostic, therapeutic, and preventive applications. This article describes a series of successful and well established applications in view of new directions that are emerging.