Tuesday, January 11, 2011

CT Scans Cancer Risk 100 Times Chest X-Ray 0.1% All Cancers USA 33%

Tags: CT Scans 100 Times More Radiation than X-Rays Cancer one Tenth percent All Cancers One Third USA

Not considered is the real risk of the contrast agents used on kidneys. One-Third of Americans get cancer. Something is wrong! The analysis below does not consider the additive effects of many cancer causing agents including radon, smoking, chemicals in food, and air pollution.

Jim Kawakami, Jan 11, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Jan 05 - Will getting two or three CT scans of the abdomen expose a person to the same amount of radiation as people who lived near the atomic blast that ravaged Hiroshima in 1945 but survived?

Will they increase a person's lifetime cancer risk?

If you answered yes to both questions, you're spot on. You're also better informed than many patients at inner-city emergency departments, according to a new survey from Cooper University Hospital in Camden, New Jersey.

Researchers there asked more than 1,100 patients who came in with stomach pain to rate statements similar to the questions above. Half said they had very little faith in the comparison between Hiroshima survivors and patients who had CT scans, rating their agreement at 13 on a scale from 0 to a perfect 100.

The majority of patients also tended to disagree that the scans would increase their cancer risk. And three-quarters underestimated the x-ray radiation from a CT scan compared with traditional chest x-rays, which are at least 100 times weaker. …

In recent decades, the number of Americans having computed tomography scans has soared, reaching 72 million in 2007, and some doctors now worry that they may be overused.

According to one government study, CT scans done in 2007 alone will cause about 29,000 cancers and kill nearly 15,000 Americans.

From a single patient's perspective, the risk seems less daunting: It would take 1000 "average" scans to produce one extra case of cancer in 50-year-olds, the National Cancer Institute's Amy Berrington told Reuters Health in November.

By comparison, about one in three Americans will develop some type of cancer, so the extra risk may be a small price to pay if the consequence is better treatment.

The radiation dosage from one scan typically ranges from a few millisieverts -- comparable to the yearly background radiation from natural sources -- to tens of millisieverts.

Hiroshima survivors living a couple miles from the blast often received between five and 100 millisieverts, according to Dr. David J. Brenner, who heads the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University in New York and was not involved in the new study. … One in Three Get Cancer. http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/735308?src=mp&spon=44

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