RE: Pregnancy tests on all I-131 patients???

["Barry Siegel" <siegelb@mirlink.wustl.edu>]

Didn't you mean to say that most beta-HCG tests do not show positive until about 2 WEEKS after conception? (See, for example, Human Reproduction 1992; 7:701-710).  Hence, waiting only one week to do a second pregnancy test may not be adequate to insure ABSOLUTELY that patient is not pregnant.

More importantly, can the cost of this duplicative testing really be justified by the frequency of occurence of pregnancy and the risks to the conceptus (largely all or none loss of conceptus) during this time window?   It seems to me that this is more a matter for case-by-case clinical judgment (considering such things as the urgency of the need for the therapy and the patient's wishes to continue pregnancy if she were, in fact, pregnant) than for a rigid policy.

Barry A. Siegel, M.D.
Division of Nuclear Medicine
Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology
Washington University School of Medicine

_______________________________________________________________________________

From: radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu on Wed, 21 Jul 1999 9:14 AM
Subject: Re: Pregnancy tests on all I-131 patients???
To: Multiple recipients of list

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