Any contaminant you have on your skin will be dissolved and absorbed into the underlying tissue.
IIRC, DMSA has a great affinity to be absorbed through the skin.
In my career in Nuclear Medicine, we used to use DMSA tagged with Technetium-99m to perform kidney scans. That was many years ago.
Now I think they only use DTPA or MAG3 bound to Technetium-99m.
Funny. Long time ago. At the end of May, I am retiring after 39 years in Healthcare, and 29 years after I last injected someone with radioactive istotope.
I had not even remembered doing DMSA scans until I came into this thread and saw DMSA. Haven’t thought about it in about 30 years, used to do them all the time.
I’ve seen many changes, been right there in the transtition from the old world of Radiology (films, darkrooms, file rooms, paper requisitions, tape recorders and transcriptionists, to digtial everything, paperless, speech recognition.
I was one of the last groups of Techs who worked with primitive rectilinear scanners for thyroid scans, which burned tiny holes in paper with a spark from an electrode to a conductive metal surface the special paper was on as a medium. They were big, clunky machines with gears, screws, and pulleys. As you took the scan the room would smell like burning paper!
We used to use Polaroid cameras on a scope displaying the radioactive material in real time, and manually taking one picture every few seconds in a flow study of the blood vessels, laying them out in a row as they were acquired, using the special fluid on the Polaroid films to seal the film, then gluing the Polaroids onto sheet of thin cardboard for display.
An amazing ride.
Even though there are many things I am disillusioned with in Healthcare now, it was a the closest I would get to a childhood dream of being a doctor. And that is pretty cool.
When I was 12, our family doctor, a Lieutenant in the Navy in Subic Bay, gave me a copy of Gray’s Anatomy because he saw how interested I was in all things medical. The book was a big, thick tome with hand-drawn medical illustrations. He also gave me a dissecting kit, and living in the Philippines, there were a lot of animals that I dissected.
But I was no student. I was awful. Terrible. So I became a jet mechanic in the Navy. By the time I got out of the Navy, I was ready to go to college and really learn, but it turned out for me to be Chemistry and Nuclear Medicine, not Medical School. Best choices I ever made, next to marrying my wife.
Then I went into the IT end of things.
And I am exiting the scene just as they are beginning to teke the steps in Medicine generally, to Radiology specifically, to the next revolution with AI. Just got my toes wet with AI. I am hopeful for good things from it, though I admit I distrust the concept of AI in general at this time. I tend to think the people who will use it for evil will cause a lot of damage we will never have foreseen. But that’s me. I guess I’m just a codger now. The Old Guy...:) I trust the younger people to be more forward thinking than I can be.
Wow. I not only feel like a witness to the major transtional history of Radiology, I took part in it too, and had incredible people teaching me all I needed to know as I went along.
How lucky is that? But then, my whole life has been that way-people helping me along, helping me to learn things I never knew. (Including here on FR, by the way, on a daily basis!)
You can probably tell-this made me quite sentimental when I saw “DMSA”...:)
Yes they know this. Thats why you clean the area you want to apply it to, first. You can also add meds or natural substances to it to be absorbed into the area to provide additional benefits.