Americans are being exposed to vastly more radiation from medical tests than they were twenty years ago, according to the US National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements.

The council says Americans living in 2006 were exposed to over seven times more radiation from such scans than those living in 1980, mainly due to computed tomography and nuclear medicine. The council’s executive vice president Kenneth Kase says the increase was “not a big surprise to anybody” and doctors are emphasising that such tests are vital in modern medicine (ABC News).

“The medical information derived from CT scans literally saves thousands of American lives on a daily basis,” says John Boone, a radiologist at the University of California, Davis Medical Center.

This is not to say that there is no fallout from this report.

Boone is also chairman of the Science Council of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (press release). The council’s ‘don’t panic’ notice on the new report also quibbles the method of calculating the radiation dose from CT scans by summing all scans performed in 2006 and dividing that by the US population. This ignores the fact that certain groups such as the elderly are more likely to get scans than others, says the AAPM.

Perhaps more seriously, the American College of Radiology is warning about overly-high numbers of radiation-based medical tests. The college puts this down to ‘self-referral’, where non-radiologists buy imaging equipment and then refer their patients to have tests on these machines (press release).

“There is a fundamental problem when the person ordering the study has a direct financial interest in maximizing the use of a particular piece of equipment,” says James Thrall, chair of the College’s Board of Chancellors (Reuters). “… Unfortunately, one of the things we have seen in the imaging world is that many physicians look at imaging as the solution to their financial problems.”

As the Cleveland Plain Dealer points out, Thrall would be expected to defend the interests of his group’s members, even though he may have a point.

“We don’t need to minimize self-referral,” says William Lewis, chief of clinical cardiology at MetroHealth Medical Center. “What we need to minimize is inappropriate imaging.”

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Protect yourself from too much radiation exposure – Plain Dealer

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