Cancer Risk From CAT Scans: Why You Shouldn't Worry

July 20, 2007 — -- A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that the use of a newer and faster type of CAT scan (also known as computerized tomography or CT) can increase a patient's potential risk of cancer when used to image the heart or the major vessels around it.

This risk -- which applies particularly to breast and lung cancer cases -- is greater for young female patients.

Researchers found, for example, that a 20-year-old woman's potential risk of developing cancer was as great as one in 114 for a single scan of the heart and aorta -- the major artery leading from the heart. In comparison, the risk for an 80-year-old was about one in 3,000.

CAT scans are used for far more than diagnosing heart problems. They have been used increasingly over the last few years for many illnesses and injuries.

CAT scans are reportedly performed some 62 million times a year, and their popularity is on the rise.

As one example, the number of CT examinations of the cervical spine performed in the emergency room has increased nearly 500 percent in recent years, while emergency room traffic has only increased by a small fraction of that.

So do these new study findings mean that we should stop using CAT scans to image the heart?

No, they don't.

Heart disease is the leading killer of both women and men in the United States, and CAT scanning is an important tool we use to diagnose heart disease effectively so we can treat it.

That said, physicians and patients should be very aware of the potential risks that CAT scans can pose, and take care to determine whether it's the best diagnostic tool in a given case.

While the new CAT scan examinations are quick and relatively painless -- often all a patient must endure is the placement of an IV -- there are other methods by which we can diagnose heart problems, including imaging examinations such as ultrasound or magnetic resonance imaging (or MRI), that do not use radiation.