There may be unanticipated risks if patients treated with radioactive drugs die and their bodies are cremated, a case report suggests.

After learning one of their patients had died and been sent for cremation, Arizona doctors sought to discover whether his radioactive medications were released into the air after being superheated, according to their report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“What we were really worried about was the possibility of someone breathing in the radioisotope,” said lead author Dr Nathan Yu, a resident physician in the department of radiation oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix.

“Once you breathe it in, it’s in your body and in direct contact with tissues.”