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Journal Watch does not ordinarily cover review articles, but a recent New England Journal of Medicine article on radiation exposure from computed tomography — written by radiology researchers at Columbia University — received so much media attention that a brief summary seems appropriate.
Numbers of CT scans have increased dramatically in the U.S. — both for diagnosing symptomatic patients and for heart, lung, colon, and whole-body screening in asymptomatic people. In pediatric populations, faster scanning times (less than a second in some cases) are partly responsible for increased CT use.
Typical organ doses of radiation are much larger with CT than with conventional radiography; for example, an abdominal CT delivers about 50 times more rad…