Dear AuntMinnie Member,
It's a problem that's not going away: Two new studies published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine highlight the dangers of radiation dose delivered during CT scans.
The studies found wide variability in CT dose between institutions and projected some 29,000 future cancers and 15,000 deaths could result from just one year's CT scans, according to an article by international editor Eric Barnes in our CT Digital Community.
One of the studies measured as much as a 13-fold difference between the highest and lowest CT dose among the different institutions queried. Certain types of exams tended to produce the biggest dose variations, the researchers said. Learn more by clicking here.
The negative publicity follows on the heels of another damaging study released earlier this month during the RSNA conference. Those researchers also found that thousands of additional radiation-induced cancers -- about 20,000 per year -- could be caused by CT scanning. That story is available by clicking here.
Radiology advocates have no trouble poking holes in such studies -- for example, by questioning whether one can really extrapolate cancer risk based on radiation risk data from atomic bomb survivors. But the fact is that concern over CT radiation dose is reaching crisis proportions.
When combined with recent incidents such as patient overexposures at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and Mad River Community Hospital in Northern California, a picture is emerging of a medical specialty that apparently can't adequately control the tools at its disposal.
What's needed now is a nationwide, coordinated effort to standardize and better regulate the radiation dose being delivered to patients during CT studies -- a sort of Image Gently campaign for all patients, not just children. As witnessed at last month's RSNA meeting, CT vendors have made great strides in advanced imaging protocols that can dramatically reduce radiation dose. The question is how to make these tools widely available -- and universally applied.
CT advocates may soon find that if they don't act themselves, someone will act for them.
