The cancer risks from CT scans

A new study from the National Cancer Institute projects 29,000 excess cancers from the 72 million CT scans that Americans got in 2007 alone. Nearly 15,000 of those cancers could be fatal.
It has been known for sometime that doctors had been oversubscribing the number of CT scans for their patients, but this is one of the first comprehensive studies in the US that has quantified the risk using actual medical data.

Richard Knox at NPR reports that one of the reasons for the large number of scans is because doctors have been seduced by the high resolution images CT scans produce, and have not considered the risk to the patient of using high intensity x-rays.

"Physicians [and their patients] cannot be complacent about the hazards of radiation or we risk creating a public health time bomb," said Rita Redberg, editor of Archives of Internal Medicine, which published the paper.

Children, younger adults and women are especially susceptible. Two-thirds of the excess cancers will occur in women, the NCI researchers say.