Life can be flat

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It’s a cold winter’s morning. You turn the ignition key on your car and all you get is a depressing clunk. The battery is flat. Of course, if you open the car bonnet you don’t see a squashed battery. A flat battery means that it can’t provide the power to start the engine, it has stopped working.

When you go to the hospital and have an X-ray, it shows what your body looks like underneath your skin. But it doesn’t reveal how well your body is working. Like the car battery, your body relies on chemistry to work, so what we need is a way of picturing the body’s chemistry.

We can now do this with a technique called as Positron Emission Tomography, or PET. For example, to detect cancer we give the patient an injection of labelled sugar. Tissues need sugar to grow and cancerous tissues grow faster than normal. So if PET shows that some parts of the body are using sugar more quickly than expected then cancer might be present. PET shows your body’s chemistry and gives the doctors a better chance of finding out what is wrong.

So far Aberdeen is the only place in Scotland that can do PET but soon it will be available to all patients who need it. So don’t be puzzled if your doctor says you need a PET, he may just think that your body’s battery is flat.

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