Glance: High-grade medical scans are key contributor to rising radiation exposure

Glance: Rising radiation exposure tied to imaging

The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday it will work with doctors and manufacturers to reduce unnecessary radiation exposure from medical scans, a problem that has been growing for decades.

The initiative will focuses on high-grade forms of imaging, including CT scans, nuclear medicine and fluoroscopy. Since the 1980s these technologies have helped doctors make lifesaving diagnoses, but they also use high doses of cancer-causing radiation.

While the risk of a single scan is small, some medical experts are worried about the health risks of a lifetime’s worth of medical scanning.

Last year a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine studied nearly 1 million patients to estimate the radiation exposure in the U.S. population due to medical imaging.

The annual average radiation exposure was small — less than 3 millisieverts, a measure of dose. However, about 20 percent in the study had moderate exposure (3 to 20 millisieverts) and 2 percent had high exposure (20 to 50 millisieverts).

Given these findings, the researchers estimated that medical imaging exposes 4 million nonelderly adults to high-level doses of radiation, or more than 20 millisieverts a year.

CT, nuclear imaging and other high-tech tests counted for just 21 percent of total imaging procedures, while traditional X-Rays made up more than 70 percent. However, the high tech scans were the leading contributor of actual radiation exposure, accounting for 75 percent.