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Advantages of CT in Young Adults Offset Potential Cancer Risks

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Young adults who undergo CT exams are most often facing critical medical conditions

With an approximate 10% annual increase in the use of computed tomography (CT) over the past 15 years in the United States, fear of an increase in radiation-induced cancers has risen, too. However, according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology, the underlying medical conditions affecting young adults who undergo CT exams are a significantly greater health risk than that of radiation-induced cancer from CT.

According to Susanna Lee, MD, PhD, 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. Lacking in this discussion is a sense of how sick these patients already are.”

In their effort to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of CT in young adults, the research team led by Dr Lee and researcher Robert L. Zondervan, MS, examined imaging records of patients aged 18 to 35 years, including 16,851 chest CT scans and 24,112 abdominopelvic CT scans. The scans were performed between 2003 and 2007 at 1 of 3 university-affiliated hospitals in Boston.

According to study results, 7.1% of young adults who underwent chest CT scans and 3.9% of those who had abdominopelvic CT scans died during the average 5.5-year follow-up period. Compared with the 0.1% long-term risk of death from radiation-induced cancer predicted by statistical models in both groups, these figures were much greater.

“It was a bit surprising to see how high the 5-year mortality rate was in this group,” Lee said. “To put it in context, the average young adult has only a 1% chance of dying in the next 5 years.”

Researchers also discovered that the most common reasons for exam were trauma and cancer (for chest CT), and abdominal pain, trauma, and cancer (for abdominopelvic CT).

“When we subtracted out cancer patients from the data set, the risk of death in the study group ranged from 2.5% to 5% – still well above the risk in the general population,” she said.

“We’re not saying be complacent about the radiation risk from CT,” Lee added. “But these people being imaged might have been in a motor vehicle accident, or have a perforated appendix or life-threatening cancer, and we’re trying to gain information from scans that can help them.”

Source: RSNA.