CT Radiation

An article by Catherine Guthrie in Time magazine: "...researchers behind two recent studies that sound the alarm about the increased cancer risk associated with multiple CT scans... physicians ... 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. "Our focus is to bring awareness to the fact that people are getting large doses of radiation and it's not innocuous," says Timothy Bullard, the study's lead author and chief medical officer at Orlando Regional Medical Center."