YOUNG women with chest pain beware: the latest medical imaging technology might do you more harm than good.
Researchers led by Andrew Einstein of Columbia University in New York have studied a technology called Computed Tomography Coronary Angiography (CTCA), which looks for coronary artery disease by building up a 3D picture of the heart. The snag is that the cancer risk from CTCA for women in their twenties seems to be much higher than for other groups.
Like conventional CT scans, CTCA involves X-rays, but uses around double the radiation dose. To determine whether the risks vary with age and sex, Einstein’s team used the latest data from the US National Academies. They estimate that the lifetime cancer risk from a single dose ranges from 1 in 3261 for an 80-year-old man to 1 in 143 for a 20-year-old woman (JAMA, vol 298, p 317).
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