Computerized tomography (CT) scans are used to diagnose various health conditions. However, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine have found that undergoing the procedure can lead to cellular damage.
Joseph Wu, a senior author for the study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, explained that medical imaging, particularly for heart disease, has experienced a boom in the past 10 years, exposing patients to low-dose radiation.
Researchers are still unclear on what exactly low-dose radiation does to the body, but the current study has now shown that cellular damage, though very subtle, is present after a patient undergoes a CT scan.
"These results should encourage physicians towards adhering to dose reduction strategies," stated Patricia Nguyen, a lead author for the study, whether or not cellular damage leads to cancer.
Concerns over low-dose radiation being possibly linked to cancer have risen in the past decade, fueled by the idea that low-dose beams of X-ray risks damaging DNA, which can lead to mutations that will encourage cells to grow into tumors.
Nguyen said these concerns are legitimate, but causal relationships are hard to prove. Cells affected by low-dose radiation cannot be tracked with current technology and what the researchers have observed is that, while cellular damage is occurring, the body is also on it, repairing what it can. The real problem lies in damage that eludes repair or cells that escape elimination, mutate and go on to produce cancer.
For the study, the researchers assessed the effects of low-dose radiation on human cells using vascular and cardiac CT scans, common imaging procedures used by doctors for various reasons. According to them, one CT scan results in radiation at least 150 times of what a chest X-ray produces.
According to the National Cancer Institute, around 29,000 future cases of cancer may be connected to 72 million CT scans carried out in the United States in 2007. Still, the researchers claim that the reliability of that prediction is dictated by how the link between radiation and cancer is measured in the first place. However, the assumption is that effects are proportional to dose, so the more an individual is exposed to radiation, the likelier they are to develop cancer in the future.
The study received funding support from the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association.
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