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Half-life (symbol t ½) is the time required for a quantity (of substance) to reduce to half of its initial value.The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay or how long stable atoms survive.
Alternatively, since the radioactive decay contributes to the "physical (i.e. radioactive)" half-life, while the metabolic elimination processes determines the "biological" half-life of the radionuclide, the two act as parallel paths for elimination of the radioactivity, the effective half-life could also be represented by the formula: [1] [2]
The activity of the daughter is given by the Bateman equation: = () + (), where and are the activity of the parent and daughter, respectively. and are the half-lives (inverses of reaction rates in the above equation modulo ln(2)) of the parent and daughter, respectively, and BR is the branching ratio.
Caesium in the body has a biological half-life of about one to four months. Mercury (as methylmercury) in the body has a half-life of about 65 days. Lead in the blood has a half life of 28–36 days. [29] [30] Lead in bone has a biological half-life of about ten years. Cadmium in bone has a biological half-life of about 30 years.
For example, the isotope copper-64, commonly used in medical research, has a half-life of 12.7 hours. If you inject a large group of animals at "time zero", but measure the radioactivity in their organs at two later times, the later groups must be "decay corrected" to adjust for the decay that has occurred between the two time points.
The absorption rate constant K a is a value used in pharmacokinetics to describe the rate at which a drug enters into the system. It is expressed in units of time −1. [1] The K a is related to the absorption half-life (t 1/2a) per the following equation: K a = ln(2) / t 1/2a.
Not all molecules in the solution have a P-32 on the last (i.e., gamma) phosphate: the "specific activity" gives the radioactivity concentration and depends on the radionuclei's half-life. If every molecule were labelled, the maximum theoretical specific activity is obtained that for P-32 is 9131 Ci/mmol.
But is also equivalent to divided by elimination rate half-life /, = /. Thus, = /. This means, for example, that an increase in total clearance results in a decrease in elimination rate half-life, provided distribution volume is constant.