Doctors fret about CT scans
Source: Agencies |
January 7, 2011, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WILL getting two or three computed tomography scans of the abdomen expose a person to the same amount of radiation as people who lived not far from the epicenter of the 1945 Hiroshima atomic bombing and survived?
Will they increase a person's lifetime cancer risk?
If you answered yes to both questions, you're right - and also more informed than many patients at US emergency departments, according to a survey by Cooper University Hospital in Camden, New Jersey.
Researchers there asked more than 1,100 patients to rate statements similar to the above questions. 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 also tended to disagree that the scans would increase their cancer risk, while three-quarters underestimated the x-ray radiation from a CT scan compared with traditional chest x-rays, which are at least 100 times weaker.
"The point of the paper was not to create mass hysteria," said Brigitte Baumann, an emergency physician at Cooper, whose findings appeared online in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. "The concern is patients who keep coming back ... to get a lot of scans," she said.
The number of Americans having CT scans has soared in recent decades to 72 million in 2007, leading some doctors to worry that they may be overused.
Patients told researchers that tests such as blood work and CT scans would boost their confidence in their medical check.
"When they go to the emergency department, they're not really happy if all you do is speak to them. They want more," Baumann said.
Will they increase a person's lifetime cancer risk?
If you answered yes to both questions, you're right - and also more informed than many patients at US emergency departments, according to a survey by Cooper University Hospital in Camden, New Jersey.
Researchers there asked more than 1,100 patients to rate statements similar to the above questions. 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 also tended to disagree that the scans would increase their cancer risk, while three-quarters underestimated the x-ray radiation from a CT scan compared with traditional chest x-rays, which are at least 100 times weaker.
"The point of the paper was not to create mass hysteria," said Brigitte Baumann, an emergency physician at Cooper, whose findings appeared online in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. "The concern is patients who keep coming back ... to get a lot of scans," she said.
The number of Americans having CT scans has soared in recent decades to 72 million in 2007, leading some doctors to worry that they may be overused.
Patients told researchers that tests such as blood work and CT scans would boost their confidence in their medical check.
"When they go to the emergency department, they're not really happy if all you do is speak to them. They want more," Baumann said.
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