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Officials said that Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is considering new safeguards for CT scanners and other imaging machines to prevent patients from receiving unnecessary radiation exposure.

Doctors and patients have become increasingly concerned about the risks of medical radiation, which research shows could cause 29,000 new cancers a year.

In December, published research showed that medical imaging tests - which includes PET scans, barium swallows and other scans - may expose people to four times as much radiation as estimated by earlier studies.

Americans' exposures to radiation have nearly doubled over the past two decades, largely because of tests such as CT s, the FDA says.

The safety push comes five months after Cedars- Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles discovered that it had accidentally exposed more than 260 patients to eight times the normal dose of radiation for CT brain scans over a period of 18 months.

The number of CT scans performed in the U.S. each year has climbed to more than 70 million, more than triple the number in 1995.

CT has become standard procedure in emergency rooms across the country for diagnosing head injuries, kidney stones and appendicitis. With nobody keeping track, scans are often repeated as part of routine follow-up or if a patient is transferred to another hospital.

The risk that any scan would lead to cancer is remote. But the risk increases with each additional scan, and even a tiny increase translates to thousands of extra cancer cases.

Source: FDA

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