iRADiX

A childhood friend of mine who stays in US visited me recently. A small bit of information about him, which I think is relevant to this piece of writing, is that he is not a doctor. Seated in my drawing room, we were chatting over a bottle of ‘Lager beer’, his favorite. He told me about a recent article that he read in one of the prominent dailies in US, ‘The Washington Post’ perhaps. This article carried a headline, “IS COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY (CT) CARCINOGENIC?” He appeared alarmed and intrigued at the same time by the tone of the article which appeared to say that somehow undergoing a CT study is going to give him a cancer. Mind you, he is not a medical professional but an engineer, very intelligent one at that. Since I am a practicing Radiologist, he thought it fit to raise this issue in front of me. He told me that the lay population in US has become paranoid about contacting cancer due to medical X-Rays. I tried to reassure him that contacting cancer due to ionizing radiation is a theoretical possibility – but I have not met or heard of any one who has become a victim of cancer after undergoing a diagnostic test such as Computed Tomography. And, I quickly veered the conversation to something less ‘carcinogenic’.

Nevertheless, I kept thinking about it much too often. What if my friend’s fears and rest of the Americans’ fear about X-Rays are not completely baseless? Is there is a scientific evidence to ‘prove’ that CT can cause cancer? Am I implanting the seeds of cancer within every young lady who comes to me for a CT scan of the Abdomen and Pelvis? Am I placing at risk of cancer, every child with a seizure disorder who lies down on my CT table for a head scan? Believe me; I was disturbed.