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Last Updated: Aug 1, 2008 - 10:24:18 AM |
By Rose Hoban
Washington DC
12 December 2006
For some time, doctors have known that milk could be used as a way of highlighting the bowel for radiological studies. Now, a researcher at a New York hospital has pitted milk against commercially available contrast media and found it does a comparable job at illuminating the bowel for computer tomagraphy scans.
Doctor Lisa Shah-Patel tested a group of 168 patients. About 60 of them received a commercial preparation of diluted barium solution and the rest received milk. All the subjects had CT scans of their small or large intestine or stomach. Then Shah-Patel gave the scans to radiologists to read the results, without the radiologists knowing which patients drank what.
The barium solution did a slightly better job at distending the walls of the bowels, but the radiologists reading the scans found no difference between barium and milk in terms of ability to read the X-rays. "Both the diluted barium base solution and the milk allow the inside of the bowel structure to appear to gray," Shah-Patel says.
Subjects could tell the difference, especially since they had to drink nearly a liter of either liquid before their scans.
"We're finding that patients prefer drinking milk, or do not object to drinking milk as much as they do drinking the diluted barium- based solution." Shah-Patel says. In addition she notes that patients drinking milk indicated they experienced fewer abdominal symptoms, including cramps, nausea, vomiting, flatulence or diarrhea.
Shah-Patel says another advantage to milk is that it's so widely available. "There's definitely a cost benefit as well, with the diluted barium-based solution costing about $18 per patient, versus milk, when bought by the quart, costing less than $1.50 per patient."
Shah-Patel says she'll continue to enroll patients in the study and refine her results. Her paper was
presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
From VOA News
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