Cancer risk in 680 000 people exposed to computed tomography scans in childhood or adolescence: data linkage study of 11 million Australians
BMJ 2013; 346 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f2360 (Published 21 May 2013) Cite this as: BMJ 2013;346:f2360
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The patients in the exposed group did not receive a ct scan randomly or just for trauma. Of course they were full of predisposing factors which could affect the results. For example, neurofibromatosis, Li-Fraumeni syndrome, Familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) and other inherited disorders have significant risk for malignant tumor, however these are rare disorders in population but not in ct scan group.
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Your study shows that CT scans during childhood and adolescence are followed by an increase in cancer incidence for all cancers combined. It would also have been interesting to show the estimated number of cancer related deaths prevented by diagnostic CT scans in your population
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Re: Cancer risk in 680 000 people exposed to computed tomography scans in childhood or adolescence: data linkage study of 11 million Australians
of the 680000 people scanned 608 got cancer because of radiation. this is nearly one cancer for every thousand patients scanned. this looks like a lot because there are 60 million scans done yearly in USA and causing 50 thousand (80% of them are single scan) radiation induced cancers? I wonder whether CT scans should be considered as a public health hazard!!!
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