Medical Radiation and cancer risk: assessing the price of progress

Medical Radiation and cancer risk: assessing the price of progress
Air date: Friday, January 11, 2013, 12:00:00 PM
Category: NIH Director's Seminars
Runtime: 01:02:02
Description: NIH Director's Seminar
Radiation exposure to the US population from diagnostic imaging has increased 6-fold in the last three decades, primarily due to the rapid increase in CT scans from 1 to 80 million per year. Despite the great medical benefits there are concerns about the potential future cancer risks from CT and other higher dose imaging tests such as nuclear medicine cardiac stress tests.
Dr. Berrington's Radiation Epidemiology Branch conducted the first study to directly assess the cancer risks after CT scans in a historical cohort study of 200,000 children in the UK. Dr. Berrington will discuss the first results from this study and also present risk projections for the number of future cancers in the US that may be related to diagnostic imaging in children and adults if use continues at current levels. Recently a number of new screening tests such as lung CT and CT colonography have been proposed for use in the general population, and newer radiotherapy techniques like proton therapy have become more widespread. Dr. Berrington will also describe work that she has conducted that assesses the balance of the potential benefits against the radiation-related cancer risks for these emerging technologies.
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