There’s a new, non-invasive way to see if smoking has affected your wellbeing. This is according to research published in the April issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, which found that in vivo ventilation/perfusion (V/Q) imaging can detect early changes to the lung caused by cigarette smoke exposure. The study, “Detection of Lung Dysfunction Using Ventilation and Perfusion SPECT in a Mouse Model of Chronic Cigarette Smoke Exposure”, also found that VQ imaging provides a non-invasive method for studying lung dysfunction in preclinical models.
So what does this mean for your wellness? According to the study’s researchers, the findings have the potential to be applied clinically to study and diagnose the early stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Cigarette smoking is the common culprit for COPD, which a slow-progressing, debilitating lung disease. COPD is defined by certain characteristics, such as chronic inflammation, increased mucus production, small-airway fibrosis and airspace enlargement. Yet often if you have COPD, you can go undiagnosed for years as symptoms take a while to present themselves, by which time you may have incurred irreversible damage.
According to N. Renee Labiris, PhD, one of the authors of the study, ‘Better diagnostic tools are needed to detect early changes in smokers to prevent further lung dysfunction and provide patients with individualized treatment regimens. Our preclinical study suggests that not only can V/Q imaging detect early and small changes in lung pathology, the type of V/Q mismatching could provide insight into the underlying pathologies, which current measures of lung function are unable to do.’
For the study, the researchers performed /Q single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and a computed tomography (CT) scan on mice who had been were exposed to cigarette smoke for 50 minutes twice daily, five days a week, for either eight or 24 weeks. When the researchers analysed the different tests, they found that the SPECT V/Q imaging was able to identify COPD characteristics before CT was able to detect structural changes in the lungs.
Labiris noted, ‘V/Q imaging is a common nuclear medicine technique, and SPECT/CT systems are increasingly used in clinical practice. As such, the technology examined in this study can be carried out in both preclinical and clinical settings, enabling researchers to translate preclinical investigations of disease, associated functional abnormalities and future drug targets into an improved understanding and management of the disease in patients.’
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