Bone marrow radiation dosimetry of high dose 131I treatment in differentiated thyroid carcinoma patients

Radiation absorbed dose to the red bone marrow, a critical organ in the therapy of thyroid carcinoma, is generally kept below 2 Gy for non-myeloablative therapies. The aim of this study was to calculate bone marrow radiation dose by using MIRDOSE3 package program and to optimize the safe limit of activity to be administered to the thyroid cancer patients.
In this study, 83 thyroid cancer patients were divided into 3 groups based on the amount of activity administered into the body. In the groups, 3700 MBq, 5550 MBq and 7400 MBq activities were used respectively. The curves of time-activity were drawn from blood samples counts and effective half-life and residence time were calculated. Correlations of bone marrow radiation dose and radioiodine effective half-life were determined as a function of administered activity via ANOVA test. Tg levels and tumour diameters were compared using Spearman’s correlation.
The effective half-lives of 131I for three groups of whole-body, receiving 3700 MBq, 5550 MBq and 7400 MBq were calculated as 20.57±5.4, 17.8±5.8 and 18.7±3.9 hours, respectively. The average bone marrow doses for 3 groups of patients were 0.32±0.08 Gy, 0.42±0.14 Gy and 0.60±0.24 Gy, respectively.
It was concluded that, the bone marrow dose to the patients still remains within the recommended level even after administering an activity of 7400 MBq of 131I to the patients.