VIAGRA Info

Radiation from CT scans done in 2007 will cause 29,000 cancers and kill nearly 15,000 Americans, researchers said on Monday.

The findings, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, add to mounting evidence that Americans are overexposed to radiation from diagnostic tests, especially from a specialized kind of X-ray called a computed tomography, or CT, scan.

“What we learned is there is a significant amount of radiation with these CT scans, more than what we thought, and there is a significant number of cancers,” said Dr. Rita Redberg, editor of the Archives of Internal Medicine, where the studies were published.

“It’s estimated that just from the CT scans done in one year, just in 2007, there will be 15,000 excess deaths,” Redberg said in a telephone interview.

“We’re doing millions of CT scans every year and the numbers are increasing. That is a lot of excess deaths.”

CT scans give doctors a view inside the body, often eliminating the need for exploratory surgery. But CT scans involve much higher radiation dose than conventional X-rays. A chest CT scan exposes the patient to more than 100 times the radiation dose of a chest X-ray.

About 70 million CT scans were done on Americans in 2007, up from 3 million in 1980. Amy Berrington de Gonzalez of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues developed a computer model to estimate the impact of so many scans.

They estimated the scans done in 2007 will cause 29,000 cancers. A third of the projected cancers will occur in people who were ages 35 to 54 when they got their CT, two-thirds will occur in women and 15 percent will arise from scans done in children or teens.

The researchers estimated there will be an extra 2,000 excess breast cancers just from CT scans done in 2007.

UNNEEDED TESTS

Redberg, who wrote a commentary on the studies, said U.S. doctors’ enthusiasm for the tests has led to an explosion in their use that is putting patients at risk.

“While certainly some of the scans are incredibly important and life saving, it is also certain that some of them were not necessary,” Redberg said.

In a separate study, Dr. Rebecca Smith-Bindman of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues analyzed data from 1,119 patients undergoing the 11 most common types of diagnostic CT scans at four institutions in 2008.

They found radiation dosage varied widely between different types of CT studies, from a median or midpoint of 2 millisieverts for a routine head CT scan to 31 millisieverts for a scan of the abdomen and pelvis, which often involves taking multiple images of the same organ.

By comparison, the average American is exposed to about 3 millisieverts of radiation a year from ground radon or flying in an airplane — a level not considered a risk to health.

The researchers said efforts need to be taken to minimize CT radiation exposure, including reducing the number of unnecessary tests, cutting the dose per study, and standardizing the doses across facilities.

Imaging equipment makers such as GE Healthcare, Siemens, Philips and Toshiba Medical Systems are working to develop low-dose CT scanners.

About three-quarters of women with breast cancer report some degree of sexual problems, according to results released at the 32nd Annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS).

Surveys have found that anywhere from a quarter to two-thirds of healthy women experience sexual problems. Given that such problems are a known side effect of breast cancer treatments that block hormone activity, researchers wanted to know how often women with breast cancer experienced them.

Dr. Shari B. Goldfarb of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York and colleagues anonymously surveyed more than 500 women with breast cancer of any stage in outpatient clinic waiting areas at MSKCC’s Breast Cancer Center and at two community centers.

Most of the women surveyed were being treated with chemotherapy, including hormone-based therapies such as tamoxifen. The disease had spread beyond the breasts in about a quarter of the women.

About three-quarters of the women - 76 percent — had sexual problems, defined as a low score on a commonly used set of questions.

That rate is significantly higher than what is seen in healthy women, Goldfarb said.

Of women reporting sexual dysfunction, about four-fifths described their sexual symptoms as bothersome. About half of patients said that their symptoms were severely bothersome.

Typical symptoms were vaginal dryness or difficulty in becoming sexually aroused.

The study did not look at potential treatments for sexual problems such as lubricants, hormones, and counseling.

“With improved treatments for breast cancer, patients are living longer, and most women treated for early-stage breast cancer will become long-term survivors,” Goldfarb pointed out. “For this reason, quality of life and symptoms become increasingly important in the short-term, during treatment and in the long-term throughout survivorship.”

Children who experience mental, economic or social hardship can develop long-term emotional, immune and metabolic problems that increase their risk of age-related diseases in adulthood, researchers say.

In the study, 1,037 people born in New Zealand between April 1972 and March 1973 were assessed for socioeconomic disadvantage, abuse and social isolation during the first 10 years of life. The study authors followed up with the participants at age 32, and checked them for three risk factors for age-related diseases: depression, high inflammation levels (measured by the blood marker C-reactive protein), and the presence of multiple metabolic issues (such as high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol levels and overweight).

Adult participants who’d experienced adversity in childhood were more likely to have the three risk factors for age-related diseases, the researchers found. Adverse childhood events contributed to an estimated 31 percent of the cases of depression, 13 percent of the cases of elevated inflammation, and 32 percent of the cases of clustered metabolic risk factors, the study authors reported.

“The effects of adverse childhood experiences on age-related disease risks in adulthood were non-redundant, cumulative and independent of the influence of established developmental and concurrent risk factors,” such as low birth weight, family history or childhood body-mass index, wrote Dr. Andrea Danese, of King’s College London, and colleagues.

“It has long been known that pathophysiological processes leading to age-related diseases may already be under way in childhood. The promotion of healthy psychosocial experiences for children is a necessary and potentially cost-effective target for the prevention of age-related disease,” the authors concluded.