Various:
A new
study
from the National Cancer Institute projects 29 000 excess
cancers from the 72 million CT scans that Americans got in 2007
alone. Nearly 15 000 of those cancers could be fatal.It has
been known for sometime that doctors had been overprescribing
the number of CT scans for their patients, but this is one of
the first comprehensive studies in the US that has quantified
the risk using actual medical data.Richard Knox at NPR
reports
that one of the reasons for the large number of scans is
because doctors have been seduced by the high-resolution images
CT scans produce, and have not considered the risk to the
patient of using high-intensity x rays."Physicians [and their
patients] cannot be complacent about the hazards of radiation
or we risk creating a public health time bomb,"
said
Rita Redberg, editor of
Archives of Internal Medicine, which published the
paper.Children, younger adults and women are especially
susceptible. Two-thirds of the excess cancers will occur in
women, the NCI researchers say.
Projected Future Cancers Possibly Related To
CT Scans In U.S.
Image
credit:
Arch Intern Med. 2009;
169(22):2071-2077 Courtesy Amy Berrington.
Image copyright: 2009 American Medical Association. All rights
reserved.
The bars in the chart above indicate the projected average number of future cancers for each age range (95% uncertainty limits) that could be related to 2007 CT scans performed in the US, according to age at exposure. The lower and upper values represent the possible margin of error from the mean estimate."Although a guiding principle in medicine is to ensure that the benefit of a procedure or therapy outweighs the risk, the explosion of CT scans in the past decade has outpaced evidence of their benefit," said Redberg. Related Links Projected cancer risks from computed tomographic scans performed in the United States in 2007 Radiation dose associated with common computed tomography examinations and the associated lifetime attributable risk of cancer Radiation from CT scans may raise cancer risk NPR CT scans may pose higher risk of cancer than first thought The Daily Telegraph Overuse of CT scans will lead to new cancer deaths, a study shows The Los Angeles Times
