When Molly Birnbaum was struck by a car in Boston last summer, she was taken to the emergency room and, as is typical of trauma care, given a CT scan to look for injuries. Birnbaum, 23, was scanned over and over, nine times in a week, until her father – outraged and alarmed – ordered the doctors to stop.
Birnbaum’s father might seem like an unlikely foe of such scans – he’s a radiologist. But in recent years, he had grown increasingly concerned about patients getting exposed to excessive amounts of radiation from CT scans, which generally emit significantly larger doses of radiation than traditional X-rays.
His daughter’s experience spurred him to action. Now he is part of a growing number of medical professionals, managed-care companies and scanner manufacturers that are trying to rein in CT scanning out of concerns over excessive radiation, which is known to increase the risk of cancer.
There’s been an explosion in CT scanning in recent years. Scans increased by nearly 50 percent between 2000 and 2003, when they hit 57 million.
The rise comes from rapidly advancing CT technology that gives doctors better, more-detailed information to work with, making the scan widely viewed as one of the most valuable diagnostic tools in the field.
What’s more, the test is noninvasive and typically doesn’t cost anything for insured patients. The test also has become popular as a means for patients to get full-body scans as a check-up.
No studies have directly examined whether people who had multiple CT scans went on to develop cancer. But as the number of CT scans has climbed, some doctors have started to take notice of individual patients who have received multiple scans that place their total radiation doses at levels near or beyond those of some survivors of the atomic-bomb attacks on Japan in World War II.
“Obviously, the concern is the increased risk related to cancer,” says Arl Van Moore, chairman of the American College of Radiology, which is also looking at the issue.
