Enter Your Email Address to Receive a
Copy of MedicExhange Member Demograhpics

The experts from ESC are concerned about radiation exposure during image testing and according to them, cardiac nuclear imaging and CCTA have an important role to play in cardiac disease diagnosis.

"We want to reassure the public that for individual patients the benefits of receiving an accurate diagnosis are likely to far outweigh the small potential risks involved in having a scan," said  "The most fundamental question that clinicians need to ask themselves is whether a test is appropriate for the individual patient, and whether that patient will derive benefit from it."

According to Juhani Knuuti, MD, ESC Working Group on Nuclear Cardiology and Cardiac CT, from Turku University Hospital, Turku, Finland, tests like CCTA are used to select patients for invasive procedures that themselves carry risks. "Any procedure is a balance of risks and benefits," he said. "What has been overlooked in recent publications is the risk of cardiovascular disease going untreated, which can even result in immediate sudden death. The potential risks of imaging tests are small relative to the diagnostic information obtained."

One study that helps put the risk of imaging into perspective suggests that living with a smoker (ie, being a passive smoker) causes a 20-time higher risk of fatal cancer than undergoing 1 CCTA scan (10 mSv). Another study suggests that the risk of having a fatal pedestrian traffic accident is 3 times higher than the risk of developing fatal cancer after 1 CCTA scan.

The way forward, said Dr. Knuuti, is to introduce strategies that reduce the radiation dose received by patients undergoing investigations. The PROTECTION 1 study, for example, showed that reducing the tube voltage from 120 kV to 100 kV resulted in a 53 % reduction in the median radiation dose for CCTA. 

"In the last 5 years the radiation dose from CCTA has been reduced from 20 to 30 mSv to 1-5 mSv. So the current dose is much lower than these papers are leading us to believe," he added.

Source : ESC

You can get more details about CT & its related topics from our CT User Group.