CT Scans Risk: Radiation Can Damage DNA Cells, Study Says

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Exposure to the radiation from getting a computerized tomography scan (CT Scan) has been shown to cause cellular damage, according to a new research.

Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine conducted a blood study on nearly 70 people before and after getting a heart CT scan. The findings were published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Imaging.

The researchers found that there is a significant amount of DNA damage and cell death after a single CT scan. According to Express, CT scans give off 150 times the amount of radiation from a chest X-ray.

According to lead author Dr. Patricia Nguyen, an assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine at Stanford, CT scan is known to emit radiation. However, researchers are unsure if the cellular damage contributes to cancer risk.

"It is the damage that escapes repair—or the cells that are not eliminated and are mutated—that go on and produce cancer," Dr. Nguyen said. "We can't track those cells with current technology."

The researchers noted that they were unable to find any DNA damage in patients with average weight and normal heart rates that received a low dose of radiation in the study.

However, the study results should prompt physicians to keeping CT scan radiation exposure at the minimum by not prescribing diagnostic testing unless absolutely necessary.

"As a patient, you should ask if you really need the scan. If the doctor says it will help, of course get it; the disease you have is best served by a scan to find out the diagnosis, what to do, and how to manage the disease," Dr. Nguyen said in a report by Fox News. "These are useful tests."

Joseph Wu, co-author of the study and director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, said the study was borne out of concern for the sharp increase of using CT scans in the past 10 years for detecting heart disease. According to CBS News, the US National Cancer Institute predicted in 2007 that nearly 30,000 cancer cases were linked to 72 million CT scans that were performed in the country for that year.

"The use of medical imaging for heart disease has exploded in the past decade," Dr. Wu said in a press release published in Stanford Medicine. "These tests expose patients to a nontrivial amount of low-dose radiation. But nobody really knows exactly what this low-dose radiation does to the patient. We now have the technology that allows us to look at very subtle, cell-level changes."