What to Know About Scans and Risk
- CT and PET/CT scans expose patients to only a small amount of radiation at a time.
- Although most patients will not be affected, most doctors try to minimize scans as a practice.
- Imaging is essential for clinician teams to determine next steps.
“A lot of our patients ask us what are the harmful effects of PET/CTs or imaging in general,” Dr. Jakub Svoboda, a medical oncologist with Penn Medicine, tells SurvivorNet. “And there’s some data that tried to quantify the exposure of radiation and compare it to exposure of radiation in other settings like Chernobyl.” Here are the findings.
Scans Use a Small Amount of Radiation
Read MoreSmall Radiation Doses Are Easier for DNA to Handle
Dr. Svoboda cites studies that explore the effects of repeated small doses of exposure versus one big one. “If you get 20 CT scans through your 10 years of indolent lymphoma and you add the amount of radiation you get with each CT scan and then multiply it and get a value, that it’s very different if you get exposed during an explosion with the same value at just one time,” he says.”That’s “because your DNA has the ability to repair and to fix things [but] if they get exposed to a really high amount of this radiation and free radicals, then the DNA will get damaged.”
He explains that continued small exposures make for “a different situation” in the body. “I think that you need to be careful not to do too many scans, but in many situations, the imaging is really essential for us, the clinicians, to know what to do, what should be the next step.”
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