Computed Tomography Essay

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When it comes to many things in the medical field there will always be a potential health risk involved in the treatment and diagnosis that will be beneficial to the patient. This is including things from prescription drugs to anything used to diagnose a medical issue. Diagnostic imaging has many modalities and is often used to diagnose many issues that include fractures, diseases, tumors, and cancer. Computed Tomography (CT), which uses radiation exposure, is one of the diagnostic imaging modalities used to detect and diagnose the medical issues previous listed and more. Computed Tomography comes with some potential health risk but also many medical diagnostic benefits. Therefore, we must ask, do the medical diagnostic benefits of computed …show more content…

Some of the potential risk include lung cancer, brain cancer, other organ cancer, and mostly breast cancer. Different factors can affect the increase in these cancer risk. In “The communication of the radiation risk from CT in relation to its clinical benefit in the era of personalized medicine: part 2: benefits versus risk of CT” S. Westra says, “The risk can be based on the age of the patient when the CT was preformed and the absorbed dose to the tissues”.1 This means that the younger the patient is and the more radiation that is used and absorbed during the Computed Tomography scan can increase the potential health risk, like cancer, to the patient. When the body’s tissues absorb the radiation used during Computed Tomography, the tissues can become damaged. As said by C. Schmidt in “CT Scans: Balancing Health Risks and Medical Benefits,” “Absorbed radiation can break chemical bonds in tissues, liberating charged ions that can damage DNA and produce cancer should cells be unable to repair themselves”.2 The damaged cells that cannot repair themselves is what causes the risk of cancer. The potential health risk, like cancer, associated with the radiation used during a Computed Tomography scan vary based on many factors such as age, absorbed dose, and if the absorbed dose damages the tissue cells beyond

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