The cancer risks from CT scans

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.

_{Image credit : Arch Intern Med. 2009; 169(22):2071-2077 Courtesy Amy Berrington. Image copyright: 2009 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.}

“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