Benefits of CT outweigh cancer risks in young adults

OAK BROOK, Ill. – The underlying medical conditions facing young adults who undergo computed tomography (CT) exams represent a significantly greater health risk than that of radiation-induced cancer from CT, according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology.

CT utilization has grown approximately 10 percent annually over the last 15 years in the U.S., raising fears of an increase in radiation-induced cancers. However, discussions of radiation-induced cancer risk often fail to take into account the condition of the patients being imaged, according to Susanna Lee, M.D., Ph.D., chief of women's imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

"The impetus for our study was the concern that the lay press often focuses on potential harm caused to patients by CT imaging," Dr. Lee said. "Lacking in this discussion is a sense of how sick these patients already are."

To better understand the risks and benefits of CT in young adults, the research team lead by Dr. Lee and researcher Robert L. Zondervan, M.S., analyzed imaging records of patients 18 to 35 years old who underwent chest or abdominopelvic CT exams between 2003 and 2007 at one of three university-affiliated hospitals in Boston. Children and young adults are more susceptible to ionizing radiation and more likely to live for the approximately 10 to 20 years considered necessary to develop a radiation-induced malignancy.

The researchers had access to records from 22,000 patients, including 16,851 chest and 24,112 abdominopelvic CT scans. During the average 5.5-year follow-up period, 7.1 percent of young adults who underwent chest CT and 3.9 percent of those who had abdominopelvic CT died: figures that were much greater than the 0.1 percent long-term risk of death from radiation-induced cancer predicted by statistical models in both groups.

source: Eurekalert