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Correspondence

Physics Department, Guy's Hospital Medical School, London, S.E.1

This excerpt was created in the absence of an abstract.

If a given quantity of radioactive phosphorus is injected into the veins of a patient, what dose of ionizing radiation will be delivered to the bones? To answer this question it is necessary to know the concentration of ³²P in the bone from the time of injection until such time as the concentration has decayed to a negligible amount. Low-Beer, Blais and Scofield (1952) have given an answer to this question based on the assumption that by the third day after injection the concentration of ³²P in the "bone compartment" (bone, liver and spleen) reaches a value which is ten times the average value for the rest of the body, and that this ratio of concentrations is maintained thereafter. Some preliminary in vivo measurements which I have made indicate that, at least for the first three weeks following injection, the concentration of ³²P in bone is little greater, if at all, than in the rest of the body. If this is the case, then it follows that the dose received by the bone has been greatly overestimated by Low-Beer et al.