FDA encourages patients to record their exposure to medical radiation

The US Food and Drug Administration has launched an initiative to reduce unnecessary radiation exposure from medical imaging. The initiative will promote the safe use of medical imaging, support doctors’ decision making about medical imaging, increase patients’ awareness, and encourage patients to record their history of imaging.

Concern about radiation exposure was raised by a paper late last year in the Archives of Internal Medicine (2009;169:2078-86, doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2009.427) that reported a 13-fold variation between the highest and lowest dose in computed tomography in four hospitals in the San Francisco area. The risk of cancer related to medical imaging is higher for younger people, …