Sodickson, a radiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, was going to Washington, D.C., to meet with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to find ways to protect patients from getting too much radiation from CT scans.

“The woman sitting next to me on the plane had a lump in her [...]]]>

Sodickson, a radiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, was going to Washington, D.C., to meet with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to find ways to protect patients from getting too much radiation from CT scans.

“The woman sitting next to me on the plane had a lump in her neck. It was thought to be cancer,” Sodickson said in an interview.

The woman’s doctor had ordered a CT scan to help determine if the lump was cancerous.

“She refused because she thought she would die of the CT scan,” Sodickson said.

A CT scan assembles cross-section images of the body into a vivid picture that gives doctors a much better look at a patient that conventional X-rays, often eliminating the need for exploratory surgery. But too much radiation exposure is believed to raise the risk of cancer and scientists are working to cut down the risk from a CT scan.

A CT scan of the chest exposes a patient to more than 100 times the radiation of an X-ray and an abdominal CT scan is roughly equivalent to 400 chest X-rays.

source www.reuters.com/news/health