What will I experience during a cardiac nuclear medicine test?
The procedure itself doesn't really cause any specific types of sensations. Again, there may be a little pain at the time when the radio tracer is administered intravenously, but other than that, there are really no side effects associated with the radio tracers themselves. Very rare, that we talked about in the past. The patient just lies down, or sometimes in some cases they sit down in a chair, and the camera system is around them, and they take the pictures. There is really no specific sensation associated with that. On the treadmill they may get tired, because they're running for example or they're doing exercise. And of course, if they have coronary disease, they may get their usual chest pain, or angina, with increasing cardiac workload during the procedure. That is really not specific to nuclear medicine, but it's a side issue in relation to the stress that the patient is undergoing for us to appropriately perform the protocol. If the patient is stressed with pharmaceuticals, for example dobutamine, dipyridamole, adenosine, they may also get some specific side effects. For example, they may get headache with some of the pharmaceuticals, such as dipyridamole. Or they may have some chest pain which may or may not be the same as angina that they have outside of the hospital.
