As a fitness enthusiast, you take care of your physical fitness through regular walking, swimming, or exercising. But at the same time, knowing the results of your daily routine, especially when it is making you capable to perform daily activities or engage in sports is crucial.
However, when you don’t understand the right health monitoring scans like a DEXA (Dual-energy Xray Absorptiometry) scan to know your body’s bone health, weight distribution, and muscles, you invite potential diseases. In addition, daily exercises can also lead to chronic back pain, and so getting an MRI ( Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scan can prevent health problems.
For this reason, this blog will guide you through the key differences between DEXA scan and MRI scan to determine which one is right for your health.
What is a DEXA Scan?
DEXA scan is a health scan where radiologists, a professional performing the medical imaging tests, check your bone’s health, its mass, mineral content. Along with this, the screening tests your overall body composition, including the percentage of fat distribution and muscle mass.
Under this DEXA scan process, your body passes through the two small doses of X-ray radiation as you lie flat on your back.
With age, your bones become prone to severe weakness. With Dexa scan, you can find any risk for Osteoporosis, a condition of severe weak bones. In addition, the test is also a healthy choice for fitness freak individuals who want to track changes in their body composition after consistent and strenuous exercises.
Benefits of DEXA Scan:
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Keeps You Alert on Your Bone Health:
Low bone density can happen for other reasons beyond growing age. As people are now adopting a sedentary lifestyle with less physical activity, it is impacting their bone mass. Also, lack of a calcium-rich diet, low levels of oestrogen, or conditions like Osteoporosis are main culprits behind the declining bone health.
With a DEXA scan, you can figure out the signs of osteopenia and treat it. This is a condition where a bone mineral density can become lower than normal. This symptom can later progress into health complications like Osteoporosis, which is a severe bone-weakening condition.
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Helps You to Get Accurate and Detailed Data on Body Composition:
Body fat composition is an important parameter to find out any internal health problems. With DEXA scan, you get to understand the total body fat in percentage, mass present in the muscles of your body, and fat around internal organs.
This is a more accurate scan than body weighing machines or BMI checking tools. For a fitness enthusiast like you, you can find if you are gaining muscles or losing fat, eliminating the risks of high body fat or low muscle mass.
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Non-Surgical and Quick:
The scan itself does not need any needles, which makes the process painless. Even the time to complete the scan is at most 20 minutes with minimum exposure to radiation.
What is a MRI Scan?
On the contrary, the MRI scan is a modern and advanced imaging test that assesses your body’s internal organs. Unlike the DEXA scan, the radiologists in the MRI screening round evaluates causes and symptoms of chronic pains, injuries, and conditions affecting the soft tissues.
Whether you want to analyse the shape or condition of the soft tissues like muscles, ligaments, tendons, or internal organs, it is best to search for the term “MRI scan near me”.
Unlike DEXA, the MRI scan relies on magnetic fields and radio waves to produce detailed images of the internal body without radiation. This makes the scan safe for as many times as you need to find symptoms or problems in joint or muscle issues.
Benefits of MRI Scan:
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Gives You Detailed Images of the Internal Organs:
There is no better way to find minor to major problems in soft tissues than an MRI scan. Even when some other scans detect soft tissues, the images you get from an MRI scan are so clear that you can easily see through the minutest details without professional interference.
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No Radiation:
While other similar scans use small doses of sound or other X-ray radiation, searching for an MRI scan near me is safe for individuals who are at risk of even small doses of radiation or are taking other useful imaging tests.
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Versatile Diagnostic Test:
MRI scans are most beneficial for diagnosing medical conditions like muscle tear, tumours, infections, or neurological disorders. It is also great for finding out possibilities of sports injuries if you have recently participated in a sport tournament or exercise.
Final Words
We hope you found this blog useful. Coming to an end, it is clear that understanding the major differences between DEXA scan and MRI scan is always helpful. If you are aiming for balancing body weight and lean mass, then DEXA scan is ideal for your fitness.
But if you are focusing on evaluating symptoms for chronic brain diseases or going through constant back pain, then consider searching for an MRI scan near me to treat the symptoms early on.