123I AND 131I LABELING OF FATTY ACIDS AND APPLICATION IN NUCLEAR MEDICINE FOR HEART IMAGING.

Erkan ÜNLENEN*, A. Yekta ÖZER**°

*Gazi University, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Nuclear Medicine, 06510 Besevler, Ankara, TURKEY. **Hacettepe University, Faculty of Pharmacy, Department of Radyopharmacy, 06100 Sihhiye, Ankara, TURKEY.
°Corresponding Author

Summary:
123I or 131I labeled fatty acids are alternative radiopharmaceuticals for 201TlCl, 99mTc-sestamibi,99mTc-tetrofosmin and the other radiopharmaceuticals which are used in heart imaging. The early studies related to heart imaging using fatty acids caused changes in original molecular structure and resulted in labeled fatty acids which had lawer biological activity. Thus, it was not desirable for scintigrafic imaging purposes. Currently, this problem has been solved by using radio-iodine labeled long chain branched fatty acids. The advantages of using fatty acids are long retention time in myocardium tissue, retention efficiency and prognosis of metabolic changes in cardiomyopathy diseases as well as coronary diseases. In this paper, the labeling with radioiodine of fatty acids and use in heart imaging studies are evaluated.

Key words:
Labeled fatty acids, Heart imaging, 123I,131I radio-iodine, Cardiac metabolism.