I often rant about the balance between risks and benefits. This article discusses the potential risks of whole body CT scanning. I first discussed this phenomenon 2 years ago – On whole body CT scans and followed that rant with – More on ‘body CT scans’.
Now we read about another potential problem – Study stirs debate over full-body scans’ cancer risk
Proponents of the increasingly popular full-body scans say the exams are safe and can discover disease in early, more curable stages. The risk of cancer, they say, is too small to worry about.
In Tuesday’s article, however, researchers say the scans expose people to about 13 milligrays of radiation, which is about the same exposure suffered by people who were 1.5 miles from the center of the World War II atomic blasts in Japan, says David Brenner, the study’s lead author and professor of radiation oncology and public health at Columbia University Medical Center.
Brenner says the cancer risk varies with age. Among 45-year-olds, for example, a single full-body scan will cause fatal cancer in one in every 1,250 people who have the exams. One full-body scan increases a person’s lifetime cancer risk by a fraction of 1% – a small amount, considering that about one in five Americans overall die from cancer.
But opponents of the scans say even a small increase in mortality is significant because full-body screenings have never been scientifically proven to benefit healthy patients.
Lawyers must love this. If we do not do a whole body scan – they could sue us for missing a cancer. If we do one, they could sue us for causing a cancer. We need a guideline which would hold up in court.
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