Sunday, September 5, 2010

CAT scan Cancer

According to a former FDA consultant,
the agency ignored evidence that CT scans are killing 14,000 people a year.
Additionally its responsible for 29,000 cases of cancer a year according to the Archives of Internal Medicine
Many insurers are reluctant to pay for the use of CT scans in regards to colon cancer
due to scientific agreement that the risks outweighs the benefits.
Young people are higher at risk as there's more time available for cancer to develop.
A 3-year old female has a 1 in 500 chance of developing cancer as a direct result.
That number jumps to 1 in 1,000 by 30 & 1 in 10,000 by 70.
The University of California suggests these numbers are far too low,
siting that the results are from old tests conducted on inanimate objects.
New studies measured the radiation dose received by 1,119 patients at 4 different hospitals.
This analysis discovered the radiation exposure was anywhere from 4 to 13 times higher than recently predicted.
Japanese survivors of the 1945 atomic bomb were found to have been exposed to the sum of only 2 or 3 CT scans according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
Any amount of exposure to radiation damages cellular DNA thereby increasing the risk of cancer and premature aging.
The baseline rate at which Americans risk getting cancer is 4.2%,
depending on the amount of scans one gets in a lifetime,
that number can rise an additional 2.7% to 12%.

CT scans give off the equivalent radiation levels of 400 chest X-rays.
Average Americans are exposed to 7 times more non-therapeutic radiation than those in 1980.
The number of Americans enduring CT scans has jumped from 3 million annually in 1980,
to 70 million today.

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