Does medical imaging cause cancer?

found out some more about this guy, he had this growth on his pituitary gland removed almost exactly five years later, and the doctors don't think it was cancer.

Is the pituary even accessible without severing brain tissue?

did this guy get a brain surgery for something that could be a benign tumor or something?

this is the reply I just received
>no, they found the tumor with the first look, after my concussion; apparently it had been there for a long time. Just didn't get around to going after it until, well, started getting tests and preliminary exams last summer then had it reduced in January.

so he already had this random tumor and the CT scan after being mugged and concussed is what found it, lol

I'm asking for sort of a clarification, but even in this case where someone got "quite a few" head CT scans has no incidence of cancer after 5 years. This guy is getting random benign tumors, and even he doesn't have brain cancer from his "quite a few" head CT scans.

just got a reply to how many "quite a few" is
>Less than half a dozen, I think. Never worried since it was just the top of my head.
so more than 2 but less than 6 within a 60 day period, basically.

can you have partial ct scans?
if that's the case I guess the CTs might be irrelevant.

>can you have partial ct scans?
I've literally never heard of it but I'm asking for some clarification. A head CT scan is a pretty specific thing, just as all of these scans are. They don't just go "ah, we'll do just the top of your head since we think that's where the damage is", that's just irresponsible. I think they were referring to their actual injury. A head CT scan is a head CT scan. They don't modify the actual scan, just the parameters related to dosage etc...

I'm asking for a clarification though so we'll see what they say.

btw, feel free to message him yourselves. please share his replies

reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4zh420/radiation_doses_a_visual_guide_xkcd/d6whrko

so here's another reply to the whole "top of my head" thing
>Well, the brain is basically in the top. I was flat on my back with my head down to my eyebrows in that ring of white material, and it was only for what seemed like a very brief time, but I always noticed that odd smell.

so they were injected with a contrast and pushed through a CT scanner. At least we know it was actually a CT scanner, lol.

I hate all of this
>probably
>generally
>risks vs benefits
stupidity. You're supposed to keep people alive. How are you not absolutely positive whether or not this shit that you use on millions of people each year causes cancer? Like, what a joke. How does nobody know? It seems like relatively easy study. We have 40 years and billions of scans.

>are you not absolutely positive
m-muh feelings

what are you talking about?

...

motherfucker it's totally valid what I'm saying. you don't just give people scans like this willy nilly without knowing. that's retarded.

medicalnewstoday.com/articles/306067.php

nice propaganda with nothing backing it up

>still pretending

its okay user

we all know you're special

i know that you post articles and say shit, but i'm willing to bet you won't sign up for a free full body diagnostic CT scan, because you know it's not safe, you fucking bullshitter.

>free diagnostic ct scan
Sign me up. I would

if you have insurance then it's basically included no matter what.

Every being on this planet is constantly being bombarded with ionizing radiation, ct and xray doses are thousands of times lower than being in the sun for 5 minutes. How do you know? Cause uv Burns your fuking skin in direct sunlight. And that gives you skin cancer and that may or may nor happen. It fucking random as fuck, but the more you get uv the higher your chances. Ignorant fucks in this place.

In other words sitting around and masturbating gives you cancer just depends how lucky you are.

>ct and xray doses are thousands of times lower than being in the sun for 5 minutes
lol no it absolutely fucking isn't you retard.

You tell me.

You would be wise to not ask so many questions, goy... can't have Big Radiology start losing money, now can we...?

Ok prove me wrong faggot.

Ok dragon dildo master. Prove me wrong

you have to prove yourself correct in the first place you fucking retard.

Still dont see how you being a faggot makes me wrong.

Skin cancer develops in the cells in the epidermis – the top or outer layer of the skin. UV radiation is made up of UVA and UVB rays which are able to penetrate the skin and cause permanent damage to the cells below.

UVA penetrates deeply into the skin (the dermis) causing genetic damage to cells, photo-ageing (wrinkling, blotchiness etc) and immune-suppression.

UVB penetrates into the epidermis (top layer of the skin) causing damage to the cells. UVB is responsible for sunburn – a significant risk factor for skin cancer, especially melanoma.

If the body is unable to repair this damage the cell can begin to divide and grow in an uncontrolled way. This growth can eventually form a tumour.

A sunburn is quite literally DNA damage. When DNA absorbs a proton from UVB, it causes a sunburn.

The amount of radiation per hour that you get from a CT scan would induce severe radiation poisoning.

even a low-dose CT scan would give you about 500 mSv if exposed for an hour.

that isn't relevant though. we already know that acute doses under 100 mSv rarely cause cancer

The EPA estimates that an acute dose of 100 mSv will increase your chance of getting cancer by 0.8%, or almost 1/100 people exposed to such a dose.

The EPA also allows an acute dose up to 250 mSv for emergency non-life saving work, meaning for 100 guys that do such work, 2 or 3 of them will die from a fatal cancer from the radiation, according to the EPA.

A trip to mars would give you about 1.5 mSv per day. Being on the ISS gives you about 0.5 mSv per day. A head CT scan gives you the same dose that would give you over 12 Sv in a day.

Getting a pelvic/abdomen CT has been estimated to induce a fatal cancer in 1/1100 people who undergo the scans.

Daily reminder that this is somehow legal and given to people on a daily basis with almost no consultation with doctors. You can go to the ER right now and say your head hurts, and they'll probably give you a CT scan, possibly even two.

This is real life, somehow.

The difference is that you're getting that dose one time, and astronauts are getting a steady stream every day. A single acute dose will not induce cancer except for under very rare circumstances. Cancer is induced after your cells go through several steps of fuckery that just aren't possible to induce from a single acute dose from a ct scan. this is why you Do see people get cancer from multiple scans in a short period of time. they aren't letting their bodies heal, basically.

By the way, only one astronaut has ever gotten cancer(pancreatic), and he's a 61 year old man that was on the ISS for a fucking long time. He received more radiation than you'll ever get from a CT scan, on a daily basis so his cells couldn't heal as easily.

and the EPA also acknowledges that cancer incidents are statistically insignificant under 100 mSv.

this is using bullshit extrapolations from LNT though, and none of them have ever been proven to be correct, ever. Hell, according to the LNT model, I have a 1 in 5711 chance of my scan giving me cancer. Your chance of getting in any motor vehicle accident and dying from it is in 1 in 100.

I'll theoretically get into 57 fatal motor vehicle accidents before a CT scan gives me cancer, basically. The chances are stupidly low in reality. Women have a higher chance of dying in childbirth in the USA than a CT scan has of giving you cancer. What american women die of childbirth anymore?

saying that a CT scan can give you cancer is literally like saying a chest x-ray can give you cancer. it almost never happens. an actual slice from a ct scan is less powerful than a chest x-ray. so logically, you could say that people would be getting cancer from their chest x-rays as well, which you practically never hear happen.

a ct scanner takes images that are 5mm apart from each other. the actual dose is in that 5mm slice of your body it's taking a picture of, which will typically be ~50 µSv. it's just that it does that 30+ times, but not in the same spot. the actual radiation you get to the area is comparable to any x-ray. people just look at the DLP, which is the sum of all of the slices, and it ends up being this significant number.

Hell, x-rays of your back are literally 1-1.5 mSv, so I don't see what this big deal is about CT scans. abdominal, hip, and pelvis x-rays are also at least .5 mSv each.

and i guarantee nobody flips out about them because "they're just x-rays not those dangerous CT scans :^)" even though you're getting 1.5 mSv to the same spot in a low back x-ray versus .05 mSv in a CT scan.

t. i work in radiology

and to piggy back onto this, yes, they are bullshit extrapolations, but even the unlucky people who get cancer from x-rays, already had some pretty big predisposition to cancer as they were. your bodies repair mechanisms HAVE to be fucked up for it to not be able to repair anything under at least 50 mSv. the mechanisms that trigger cancer, you'd have to be the most unlucky person for a single shot of radiation that you'd get from an x-ray or CT scan for it to trigger all of the mutations required for cancer. One good thing about this even for that one stupidly unlucky guy is that radiation practically never, ever induces malignant, actual cancer, just benign tumors that are typically not fatal..

you'd be better off getting 2 mSv in ten seconds than getting 500 mSv in one hour, though. you're greatly underestimating the difference in damage done in acutely vs. over a period of time. 2 mSv won't do anything to you even acutely. 500 mSv even over 24 hours would fuck your shit up, yes.

If it does, nobody has been able to prove it yet.

So, if it does, it so rare that it's statistically insignificant, and could be due to something unrelated, or not the entire reason. The doses you get in X-Rays and CT scans isn't enough to damage cells, overwhelm your bodies natural repair mechanisms, or especially kill cells. It may damage a small percentage of cells, that are then repaired within minutes of the scan. Your body identifies and begins to repair radiation damage in seconds. I remember reading in another radiation thread where some idiot was talking about being more worried about how many brain cells his CT scan killed, lol. I think he had too many brain cells killed already to not understand that radiation doesn't kill cells at these levels, not even close.

>medicalnewstoday
Sounds unbiased! :^)

Yes

>The EPA estimates that an acute dose of 100 mSv will increase your chance of getting cancer by 0.8%, or almost 1/100 people exposed to such a dose.

Increasing something BY 1% is not the same as increasing something TO 1%.

but that's what they saying.

Dude, there is one secret. You're actually getting cancer for 5-6 times for day. But guess what? Your immune system simply turns infested cell into sh#t. But the actual cancer is when your immune system cant identify a real threat, and it gives f#ck about that you're actually sick. And that's the precise definition of *cancer*. And one more funny fact. You can actually get this cureless cr#p by the simple fact of your existence, because cells of each living organism are actually replicating *for all the time they live, and any of them can possibly contain your such beloved friend*. But the chance is quite low, though.

>The committee finds the linear no-threshold (LNT) model to be a computationally convenient starting point.

nap.edu/read/11340/chapter/2#7

Which makes the data useless because the LNT model is garbage. But the predictions are so low anyway that they disappear into the normal noise, as the authors pretty freely confess on their own.

>the BEIR VII lifetime risk model predicts that approximately 1 person in 100 would be expected to develop cancer (solid cancer or leukemia) from a dose of 0.1 Sv above background, while approximately 42 of the 100 individuals would be expected to develop solid cancer or leukemia from other causes.

Now if their model actually was true, then contemporary radiotherapy wouldn't be used because it would have something close to 100% chance of causing cancer.

Radiation brachytherapy doses are not uncommonly in excess of 50 GY. According to that list, in combination with the LINEAR part of the LNT being true, a 15 year old reciving just 1 GY would end up at 11.8% chance of lifetime cancer. so a dose of 50GY would give the patient an absolutely certain 500% lifetime chance of developing cancer. So the model used for that picture is actually proven wrong by experiment and should be promptly discarded.

t;dr there is no way of knowing

oops lol

if you use it often then the chances of cancer are increased -> it is probable then
in most cases though people don't take these scans that often and if they do it's for serious diseases. this is the norm so "generally" the benefits outweigh the risk

what the hell is your problem. if you want numbers then look up statistics, otherwise drop the tinfoil hat and don't worry about it. if you ever need such a scan you'll be happy they exist.

>if they do it's for serious diseases

no, they don't. people get CT scans because they have stomach aches and headaches now. i hit my head and went to the ER and they gave me a CT scan.

>"generally"
lol make something mean as little as possible, why don't you. you obviously don't believe it if you can't even type it out without putting it in """quotes""". why don't you just admit it's defensive medicine irresponsibility?

>i hit my head and went to the ER and they gave me a CT scan.
Bleeding in your brain might not be a problem as you clearly don't use it for thinking. Most other people consider it an investigation that's worthwhile.

but CT scans don't typically detect that as well as an MRI so that wouldn't make sense.

but isn't it pretty common for radiotherapy patients to end up with cancer again years later from the radiation?

>cheap 5 minute imaging that detects bleeding quite clearly and is availible for most emergency patients
vs
>expensive and long image study that occupies a machine that other patients also need.

How about you shut the fuck up about things you have no clue about?

Yes. Both chemotherapy and radiotherapy increases cancer risk, as do the fact that you already had one cancer and therefor a shitty repair mechanism or immune system.

But we don't see the 100% cancer rate that we would if the LNT was true, even in these patients that are clearly already predisposed to have cancer.

CT scans literally take 5-10 seconds

you don't know what you're talking about lol

and no, an MRI is much better at detecting bleeding in the brain.

It's just scary not knowing. Have you ever had a CT scan? You have this worry all of the time that lingers no matter what studies you read. No matter how much you reassure yourself, it's always there because you don't actually know for sure. It fucking sucks very much.

>CT scans literally take 5-10 seconds

There aren't contrast free hand held CT scanners availible that you cna just pick up and pull the trigge on. You need to be directed to the radiology ward, you need an IV access through which contrast can be pushed and hooked up to the machine, you need to lay down next to the gantry and get instructions not to breathe, a scout scan is acuired to better deliminate the target area and then the full scan is aquired and quickly inspecte for adequacy bythe techs. After which you need to be unplugged from contrast infusomat and sent on your merry way to wherever is the next place.

The actual scanning may only take 5-10 seconds but you'll be occupying the machine for more than that you fucking half wit idiot.

> MRI is much better at detecting bleeding in the brain.

It's slightly better due to its overall superior image quality but for most bleedings a CT is perfectly adequate because a trained professional is interpreting, not your 5 year old niece.

Do you ever worry about dying when you sit down in a car? Every time could be the last.

Do you ever worry about cancer when drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco? You never know how much cancer it will give you.

When a truck drives by closely, what if it runs on some cheap leaded and radioactive chinese knock off fuel. You might due to that.

Steak. You can put it in your throat and fucking die.

And so on.

Whatever, you're a fucking moron and I hope you actually got cancer from your CT scans.

The problem is that you aren't in control of radiation giving you cancer and you can't do anything about it until it decides to become a problem.

Not every CT scan uses contrast.

Radiation is a guaranteed damage, while driving isn't.

Are you seriously comparing ionizing radiation to drinking a beer or smoking a cigarette?

You're literally retarded.

>Are you seriously comparing ionizing radiation to drinking a beer or smoking a cigarette?

Yes. Go out in the sun, UV is Ionizing radiation.
Stay inside, there's also ionizing radiation in the form of "background" raidation. Have metabolic activity(aka be not dead), you now create reactive oxygen species that can damage and kill cells.

You know what else creates reactive oxygen species? Ionizing radiation through interaction with water in your body, it's one of the main modalities of how it deals damage, that's also why Tardigrades are radiation resistant when they dehydrate themself.

You're completely fucking clueless to he point where you idea of ionizing radiation is on par with some folk tale of evil spirits. Don't bother trying to learn because you're clearly too fucking dense to be able to.

>UV is Ionizing radiation.

X-rays are much worse than cigarettes, alcohol, or driving a car(lol seriously?)

>hoping someone gets cancer
almost cut myself on that

Yes.
Longer wavelengths than UV can also be ionizing but I'll let that be a mystery that your idiot brain can never solve.

and you should have said that because not all UV radiation is ionizing you fucking plebeian.

How do you think solar cells work user?

We THINK that it MIGHT singularly cause cancer IF you're a kid AND you have multiple scans.

AKA meh probably not desu. nobody has been able to prove it as more than a minor concern if you get multiple so who really cares

Some australian study says that getting a CT scan increases your risk of cancer by 24% lmao, supposedly.

Yes, it can be reached though incision within the nasal cavity.

that would mean that like everyone would get cancer though. 1 in 10 americans get a CT scan per year, so 1 in 40 people in the USA is going to get cancer from their single CT scan? seems pretty silly, really. that'd be like 8,000,000 people. such a rise would be really obvious in any statistical data for cancer incidence.

I hate these sort of fake news-science articles

its all "500% increase in bullshit received on tuesdays!"

Well percentages don't mean shit if the number they're applied to aren't very significant

wew, 24% increase on a raw chance of 0.00000000000000001 is 0.0000000000000000124

No it'd mean this
multiplying percentages onto really really small numbers is equal to an ever so slightly larger, really really small number

ergo, 24% of near zero is still near zero

that is 8,000,000 every year, btw. makes it even more retarded and not realistic. that 24% figure is probably taken in the wrong way.

you mean this study?
bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f2360

>Results 60674 cancers were recorded, including 3150 in 680211 people exposed to a CT scan at least one year before any cancer diagnosis. The mean duration of follow-up after exposure was 9.5 years. Overall cancer incidence was 24% greater for exposed than for unexposed people, after accounting for age, sex, and year of birth (incidence rate ratio (IRR) 1.24 (95% confidence interval 1.20 to 1.29); P

>The absolute excess incidence rate for all cancers combined was 9.38 per 100000 person years at risk
...so... for people at risk, meaning they had a CT scan, they found an excess of basically 1 cancer per 10,000 people?

this makes no sense

according to some guy at harvard

adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014JRP....34E...1W

that aussie study is retarded

You're literally a fucking retard and shouldn't be allowed to post.

>motherfucker it's totally valid what I'm saying
If you have a head injury, why do you care about slightly increasing your chances of dying from cancer much later, when the head injury can kill you right now?

Lol, it's pretty obvious when a head injury is serious. You'll have a severe headache that doesn't go away. That's really the only thing. IF you don't have that, your head injury isn't worth spinning the cylinder with a fucking CT scan you moron. I had a head CT scan for a totally bullshit reason and the doctor just didn't care. My dose was about 1.5 mSv and nobody in my family ever gets cancer, so I more than likely beat any odds that this will affect me, but some people get higher doses, and their dad has a cancer that came out of nowhere, likely giving them a genetic predisposition, and that single CT scan will affect them.

If you tell people that your odds of getting cancer go up by 1/2000(if you a male), I fucking G U A R A N T E E you that no guy would ever, ever get a CT scan unless they were literally in an emergency, which most aren't.

The CT scan should be solely for life or death situations, not for someone that goes to the ER for a fucking headache or stomache ache that just wants to know if his symptoms are normal from an actual doctor since they say to not read shit online. What's the point?

>I had a head CT scan for a totally bullshit reason and the doctor just didn't care.
Then why not refuse it if you were so convinced it was a bullshit reason? You just have to sign a paper stating you are responsible for your choices.

> it's pretty obvious when a head injury is serious.
You're user MD and know about this are you? Oh wait, you aren't and are full of shit, how do I know? Because I'm fucking user MD, now fuck off and take your harmful advice with you.

>Then why not refuse it if you were so convinced it was a bullshit reason? You just have to sign a paper stating you are responsible for your choices.

Hindsight is 20/20 and I didn't know the radiation dangers until it was too late.

>I didn't know the radiation dangers until it was too late.
You still don't understand them. What you should do is start taking antipsychotic medication before it's too late.

go get a scan if it's such a non-issue.

Sure I could, but what for?

full body diagnostic, why not? totally safe right?

>full body diagnostic
You mean a polytrauma protocol? Otherwise you just scan certain parts in certain contrast perfusion phases? Oh wait nm, I forgot you were a clueless layman.

But sure, why not. I frequently send people for scans so why not have one myself.

>it's a user plays doctor episode
why do you do this

I'm not playing anything that I'm not.

Guys, he's joking.

The reason NMR was changed to MRI when they started marketing it was because they didn't want the first word on their new machine to be "nuclear" because people would think "cancer" right away. NMR just induces magnetic responses on free hydrogen atoms in the body. You can't get cancer from standing next to a big magnet - there's no mechanism for a mutation to occur.

here
I hope you're baiting. Because my post was making a reference to some shitty spectroscopy book that explained why MRIs have their name. (The word nuclear scares normies for some odd reason)