Page 20 - What Doctors Don't Tell You - AU-NZ (February-March 2020)

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UPFRONT
HIGH-RADIATION CT SCANS

IN PREGNANCY QUADRUPLE

IN 20 YEARS

Pregnant women today are getting four
times the number of powerful imaging
scans a mother-to-be was getting 20 years
ago—exposing her and the growing fetus to
dangerous levels of radiation.
The biggest increase is in CT (computed
tomography) scans, which use high doses of
ionizing radiation to create a detailed image
of the growing baby.
The use of CT has quadrupled in the US and
doubled in Canada over the last 20 years,
researchers at the University of California at
San Francisco have discovered.
Instead of relying on traditional ultrasound,
doctors are turning to CT, also called medical
imaging, to detect serious medical conditions.
“Imaging can be helpful, but it can be
over-used. Always, but especially if you’re
pregnant, you should ask whether it is really
medically necessary to have any imaging
test that involves ionizing radiation,” said
researcher Rebecca Smith-Bindman.
A CT scan releases far higher levels of
radiation than a standard x-ray, and nobody
knows what damage this could do to the
growing fetus.
The researchers tracked 3.5 million
pregnancies in six health systems in the US
and the Canadian state of Ontario between
1996 and 2016. In that time, 5.3 percent
of the women in the US and 3.6 percent in
Ontario had a CT scan.
JAMA Netw Open, 2019; 2: e197249

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20 WDDTY | ISSUE 04 | FEB/MAR 2020 FACEBOOK.COM/WDDTYAUNZ