Introduction: The indispensable Nuclear Medicine (NM) technology has been utilized for diagnosis of pathologies, cancer staging and researches; however, it accompanied by potential hazards; hence the aim of this study was to estimate the impact of radioactive dose of bone scintigraphy in quantity of WBCs and RBCs relative to ageing and body mass index (BMI). 

 

Methods: The Technetium-99m generator eluted based on time activity formula ( ) and further the eluted dose mixed with Methylene Diphosphate (MDP) and injected to specific patient based on BMI. Then WBCs and RBCs before and after 3-3.5 hours of dose injection estimated using automated cell counter (Sysmex KX-21) and the collected data of 150 patients analyzed by SPSS. 

 

Results: The results showed that Females were the common gender referred to bone scan representing 70%. The WBC and RBCs count increases following the ageing from 18–61 and 18-50 years old respectively then decreases following ageing. WBCs increases as the BMI increases from≤18.49 (underweight) up to 25–29.9 (overweight) then decreases among obese (30 – 39.9) and peaking among Morbidly obese (≥ 40 Kg) but remains in normal range, while RBCs increases as the BMI increases from underweight (≤18.49) up to normal BMI (18.5–24.9) then persist semi constant in normal range among the rest weights. The activity dose (15±2.9 mCi) of bone scan reduces significantly the WBCs by 3.8% at P-value = 0.00 and P=value = 0.05) relative to age and BMI respectively but reduced RBCs insignificantly (P-value = 0.32) by 3.6% relative to normal.

 

Conclusion: NM doses of 15±2.9 mCi induce significant reduction in WBCs with regard to age and BMI, while the effect in RBCs was insignificant. Hence the ideal count of WBCs is necessary to be assessed before bone scan and the dose better reduced as less as the applied formula gave. Other methods of dose estimation will be contemplated and the image quality could be maintained by increasing image acquisition time or using SPECT.