Are CT scans the wild west of today’s medicine, with little sense of law or regulation and a heightened expectation of premature death?
Two new studies appearing in the Archives of Internal Medicine suggest the analogy might not be entirely inappropriate. More than 70 million CT scans are performed each year, representing a tripling of usage since 1993, yet there is little standardization in utilization patterns or radiation doses, and the consequence may be a much higher rate than expected of cancer and death in the coming decades. “15,000 persons may die as a direct result of CT scans physicians had ordered in 2007 alone,” writes Rita Redberg, in an accompanying editorial. Amy Berrington de González and colleagues estimated that due to CT scans performed in 2007, 29,000 future cancers would occur in the future, leading to 15,000 deaths. Combining data from survey and insurance claims with previously published risk models they estimated that 29,000 cancers in the future “could be related to CT scans performed in the US in 2007.” Most of the cancers were due to scans of the abdomen and pelvis (14,000 cases), chest (4,1
