Radiation Risks for Breasts Screening

Each time a doctor prescribes you to make some radiation tests, he should check up your past of radiation records and whether you had certain negative reactions or allergies to it. After this, he will only be able to say exactly how risky is another set of radiations to that patient and whether there is any hope that the patient will stand those radiations again.

According to those new studies in this regard, the conclusion is that, as nowadays few are the doctors that are actually acting like this, it would be good and essential for the living people, that more doctors embraced this approach.

This is due to something that was recently found out, that some imaging breasts exams, in which they use injection radioactive material, expose women to a higher risk of cancer, at their most vulnerable organs.

In over two decade’s time, the percentage of the total radiation population in the United States increased with sevenfold. As there are some people that are aware of this fact and that actually think twice before subjecting a patients to such intervention, some do not even begin to understand what this is all about and how could he do wrong to a person.

Dr. Edward Hendrink, a professor of radiology at the University Colorado – Denver School of Medicine in Aurora, has been studying the effect of breast imaging for over thirty years now, and is well aware of the fact that no one really put to himself the question of whether there are any bigger risks to some people than in others, whether the dosage should be sometimes smaller and sometimes bigger: “They’re treating all the tests as if they have the same radiation dose and risk as mammography, and the truth is they have a much, much higher risk. The point of the paper was to say that not all the breast imaging procedures have comparable risks and doses.”

These breasts imaging – B.S.G.I and positron emission mammography – P.E.M is meant to be used just in those cases when it is strongly believed that the person in question may be suffering from a cancerous lesion. As, in routine screening you can easily use mammography or ultrasound.

There is no such thing as routine screening without any risk at all, for increasing the possibility of breast cancer, but while the normal way of mammography increases the risk with 1,3 cancers per 100,000 women, a single B. S. G. I will increase the risk to 20 or 30 times more for catching any if the cancers mentioned above.

The latest one and as well the P.E.M

apart from increasing the risk of breast cancer, they as well increase the risk for other cancers – intestines, bladder, kidney, ovaries, color. This is why; it is a general concern that the use of these techniques will become more and more a common thing, without taking into consideration the high risk a human being exposes himself to.

Yes, it is by no means a very good and more accurate discovery, but in order to prescribe this test to a person, you should make further look up into that person’s health status and just then decide whether it is good that he takes this risk or not.

At the moment a campaign for reducing the overuse of these machines and of getting in touch with the risks they expose the patients to, is being held all over the country. Doctors agree to the fact that the comparison with the mammography does not find itself in the right place, as while the mammography has very low levels of radiation, the B.S.G.I technology has an increased level of radiation. Even the vice president of the marketing department from the company that makes the P.E.M is in agreement that this tool should not be used for routine screening, as it has a higher dose of radiation.

However, at the end of the day it remains at the doctor’s level to weight the balance between the risk of using this tool and the benefit of seeing clearer if there is anything wrong with you.