Cancers caused by CT scans?

My cousin includes little snippets of medical information in her weekly news to friends and relatives. This keeps my library skills sharp because sometimes I look at the original source—if not the source she quotes, which is usually for lay people, then the cited research. After so many years in a medical library, I just like that stuff.   So when I saw

“According to April 2013 “Health Alert”: CT scans=800 chest x-rays. Nuclear scans=2000 chest x-rays. Medicine causes 30,000 cancers annually. Drugs, medical procedures, surgeries and scans are the #1 cause of death in America every year.”

I decided to look it up.   Health Alert which may have cited the sources is a fairly common title, so I skipped that.   I haven’t found all of it, but I found several articles referring to a 2007 study, then found this editorial about CT scans in Arch Intern Med. 2009;169(22):2049-2050, which is a little easier to read than the research and provides some information on how the study on CT scans was done:

Although if they were using Medicare claims data, those patients mostly likely won’t be around in 20-30 years given that the reason they were having a CT scan in the first place might have put them at some sort of health risk.  Also, it would be interesting (and I might look) to see how common CT scans are for younger people who are much healthier than the over 65 demographic.   That said, Dr. Redberg’s advice about being cautious should be noted.

The other study by Bindman [free] noted in Archives reports  a patient could get as much radiation from one CT scan as 74 mammograms or 442 chest X-rays.  That’s less than cited in Health Alert, but still way more than one would expect.  You would certainly want to weigh the benefits of so much radiation. Bindman also noted that CTs used to be recommended only for the very sick, and are now often used for people who are basically healthy and therefore exposing them to a lot of risk.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-12-15-radiation15_st_N.htm

http://www.prevention.com/health/healthy-living/can-ct-scans-give-you-cancer

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/779527