|
 Budoshu rated 3 months ago - Computed tomography (CT or CAT) scans help doctors detect everything from cancer to kidney stones. But some physicians are raising concerns about the safety of such procedures -- most notably, an increase in cancer risk. A CT scan packs a mega-dose of radiation -- as much as 500 times that of a conv...
|
|
1 Reviews
-
-
- Budoshu rated 3 months ago
- Computed tomography (CT or CAT) scans help doctors detect everything from cancer to kidney stones. But some physicians are raising concerns about the safety of such procedures -- most notably, an increase in cancer risk. A CT scan packs a mega-dose of radiation -- as much as 500 times that of a conventional X-ray.researchers behind two recent studies that sound the alarm about the increased cancer risk associated with multiple CT scans. In the first study of its kind, physicians at hospitals in Florida and Washington, D.C., evaluated the medical-imaging records of 1,243 randomly selected patients to calculate just how much radiation each patient had sustained in the past five years. Although CT scans were the biggest source of radiation, other offenders included X-rays and mammograms. The results of the study, presented in May at the annual conference of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, were disturbing: the average patient had received 45 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation. (The typical chest X-ray dispatches 0.02 mSv of radiation.) And 12% of patients had gotten more than twice that amount -- 100 mSv or more.
|
