CT scans are used for the diagnosis of a numerous health symptoms in today's society. They allow your doctor a clear picture of the inner workings of your body, but unfortunately these screenings come with a price. Using one example, a cardiac CT angiogram, or a cardiac CTA, specifically looks for blockages in the heart, but this helpful medical tool may be doing some serious additional harm.
According to researchers at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, a cardiac CTA exposes patients to the same amount of radiation as 600 chest X-rays - an amount of radiation also close to a single piece of radioactive food.
Researchers warn that in many cases, the benefits of a cardiac CTA outweigh the risks and caution people against swearing them off entirely, but it can be difficult to tell when you truly need to go through such a risky screening.
Dr. Gilbert Raff of the Ministrelli Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Imaging at the William Beaumont Hospital says that comparing the radiation amounts to those of regular X-rays is unfair, that "modern technology has reduced the chest X-ray [radiation] dose so substantially that it is no longer a fair or reasonable target to use." Of course the mere nature of his position as director at the Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Imaging begs us to question his impartiality.