Radiation exposure of patients undergoing nuclear medicine procedures in Germany between 1996 and 2000. Multicenter evaluation of age and gender-specific patient data

The aim of this study was to estimate both the frequency and effective dose of nuclear medicine procedures performed in Germany between 1996 and 2000 for different subgroups of patients. Methods: electronically archived data from 14 hospitals and 10 private practices were restored and statistically analyzed. The effective dose per examination was calculated according to ICRP publication 80 using the tissue weighting factors given in ICRP publication 60. Based on the data collected, statistical parameters were computed to characterize the frequency and effective dose of the various nuclear medicine procedures. Results: in total, 604,771 nuclear medicine procedures performed in 433,709 patients were analyzed. On average, 1.4 examinations were carried out per patient and year. The median effective dose was 1.7 [5.-95. percentile; mean: 0.4-8.5; 2.9] mSv per examination and 2.3 [0.5-11.2; 3.5] mSv per patient. Interestingly, the mean effective dose per examination, but not the number of examinations per year increased with the age of the patients. Most frequent were examinations of the thyroid (36.7%), the skeleton (27.1%) and the cardiovascular system (11.1%), which were associated with a median effective dose of 0.5 [0.5-1.1; 0.7] mSv, 3.4 [2.9-5.1; 3.6] mSv and 7.3 [3.2-21.0; 9.5] mSv, respectively. Over the five-year period examined, the total annual number of PET procedures (222.3%) as well as of examinations of thyroid (24.5%), skeleton (17.9%), and the cardiovascular system (14.9%) increased markedly, whereas a decrease was observed for brain (-39.3%), lung (-20.2%) and renal (-15.0%) scans. Conclusion: the age- and gender-specific data presented in this study provide detailed public health information on both the current status and recent trends in the practice of diagnostic nuclear medicine examinations. (orig.)