Published 13 October 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b4217
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b4217

News

Radiation overdose in 200 patients leads to FDA safety notice

Paula Gould

1 Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The US Food and Drug Administration is investigating how stroke patients at a Californian hospital were exposed to excessive levels of ionising radiation during brain scans.

More than 200 patients at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles who underwent computed tomography (CT) brain perfusion received up to eight times the anticipated dose of radiation. The overdosing continued unnoticed for 18 months and was discovered only when a patient reported unexpected side effects.

Brain perfusion scanning is a relatively new way of ascertaining how much damage a stroke has caused to the brain and is currently practised more widely in the United States than in the United Kingdom.

Doctors at the Los Angeles hospital had believed that their brain perfusion scans were delivering a maximum dose of 0.5 gray to the head. An internal investigation has now shown that between February 2008 and August 2009 stroke patients were actually being . . . [Full text of this article]


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