Melania Rizzoli
If you are a healthy but anxious person, because you are afraid of diseases, especially malignant tumors, and you want to have a complete and non-invasive check-up before the autumn to check your health and reassure you, a new exam is available today. . It is an MRI of the whole body, without radiation, without the need for contrast medium, and absolutely safe, which in the time of thirty minutes, in a single session, is able to carry out a complete screening of the whole body, from the top of the skull to the big toes, and to reveal if you are in good health and free from tumor pathologies, or to visualize suspicious lesions even of a few millimeters (from 3 to 4 millimeters), still “silent”, hidden and dormant in the body , until now not identifiable with any other technique, those that today escape all available prevention tests, thus allowing them to be attacked as long as they are small and localized, with the best possibilities of treatment and with a guarantee of recovery.
The Whole Body Diffusion (DWB) is a sophisticated latest generation magnetic resonance radiological device, which allows to find most of the tumors in a primordial state, those that until now had no chance of being identified, which for some time it is used in patients with neoplasms at high risk of developing hidden and asymptomatic metastases, and given its high diagnostic precision it was decided to apply it also for the screening of healthy people, to facilitate the very early diagnosis of nascent and very small tumors, which do not give still signs of their presence, especially in organs such as the brain, pancreas, kidney, bones, but also of blood cancers such as lymphomas and myelomas, which manifest their symptoms when they are already widespread, all neoplasms still considered “orphans” of a specific prevention to identify them early. Like all MRI exams, the Whole Body does not use ionizing radiation, does not require the injection of contrast fluid, is non-invasive, does not require any specific preparation, does not require the intake of drugs, or the need for fasting or intestinal emptying, it is completely free of biological risks and at the end of the examination the patient can return to normal activities without any limitation.
STEP FORWARD
The thousands of detailed images of the organs and tissues processed by this examination are possible thanks to a method of use that provides for the study of the molecular composition of the individual tissues, of whatever consistency they are, so that those hypercellular, that is with the cells thickly crammed and crowded together, because they proliferate in a disordered way, as happens in carcinomas, they are clearly brighter than the surrounding tissues, in a three-dimensional and panoramic reconstruction even of the microscopic lesions hidden in the various organs, distinguishing them between disease and radiological artifacts. Whole Body Diffusion in itself is not new, because this method of investigation is active in the main European and American cancer hospitals, where patients already suffering from cancer are subjected to it because they are at high risk of asymptomatic metastases; and it is not a foreign exclusive because even our European Institute of Oncology (IEO) in Milan has been using it for some time, with daily use, first with very long times, today reduced to half an hour, having also contributed to its improvement. and evolution. The novelty is that the leading international experts in diagnostic imaging, with an initiative coordinated by the specialists of the IEO, have signed a great step forward, with guidelines published in the journal Radiology, deciding to extend this method also on healthy patients, as a strategy preventive for the early diagnosis of solid and liquid malignant tumors.
ONE SESSION ONLY
Whole Body Diffusion should be noted that it does not replace the standard investigation methods used so far for the most common cancers in organs such as prostate, breast, lung and colorectal, which have effective tests such as PSA, mammography, CT scan. low dose, colonoscopy and the search for occult blood in the stool, but it has been developed to complement the classic tests and detect malignant organ tumors that do not enjoy standard screening activities, with the advantage of diagnosing cancer at its nascent state in a single session, without resorting to multiple examinations of individual body segments. For this reason, the IEO experts agreed in considering this innovative WBD as an additional important tool for “precision medicine” capable of guaranteeing, without side effects, very early and accurate diagnoses, which in many cases proved not to be even suspected life-saving.
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