What we know and what we don't know about cancer risks associated with radiation doses from radiological imaging

Quantifying radiation-induced cancer risks associated with radiological examinations is not easy, which has resulted in much controversy. We can clarify the situation by distinguishing between higher dose examinations, such as CT, positron emission tomography–CT or fluoroscopically guided interventions, and lower dose “conventional” X-ray examinations. For higher dose examinations, the epidemiological data, from atomic bomb survivors exposed to low doses and from direct epidemiological studies of paediatric CT, are reasonably consistent, suggesting that we do have a reasonable quantitative understanding of the individual risks: in summary, very small but unlikely to be zero. For lower dose examinations, we have very little data, and the situation is much less certain, however, the collective dose from these lower dose examinations is comparatively unimportant from a public health perspective.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  British Journal of Radiology

• Publication date

  2014-01-31

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Physics, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1259/bjr.20130629PMID 24198200PMCID 4064597
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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