Monday, February 1, 2010

NIH will start keeping track of patients' radiation exposure


TOXICITY

NIH will start keeping track of patients' radiation exposure

By Liz Szabo

Source:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-02-01-radiation01_ST_N.htm


Concerned that Americans may be accumulating too much lifetime radiation exposure from medical tests, doctors at the National Institutes of Health will begin recording how much radiation patients receive from CT scans and other procedures in their electronic medical records.

A study in the Archives of Internal Medicine in December estimated that radiation from such procedures, whose use has grown dramatically in recent years, causes 29,000 new cancers and 14,500 deaths a year.

A second Archivesstudy that month said the problem could be even worse, calculating that patients get four times as much radiation from imaging tests as previously believed. Children are particularly vulnerable because they're small and still growing.


For the full article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-02-01-radiation01_ST_N.htm


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