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Medical radiation exposure fell in the US from 2006 to 2016

Press releases may be edited for formatting or style | March 17, 2020 CT Molecular Imaging X-Ray
OAK BROOK, Ill. - Medical radiation exposure to patients in the U.S. fell by 20% between 2006 and 2016, reversing a quarter century-long trend of increasing exposure, according to a study appearing in the journal Radiology.

The use of medical imaging has grown rapidly in recent decades, raising concerns about the exposure of patients to ionizing radiation. A landmark report published in 2008 found that per capita radiation exposure in the U.S. increased six-fold between 1980 and 2006.

"The radiation dose to the U.S. population went up dramatically because of medical exposure, mostly from CT scanning and nuclear medicine, and that woke everybody up to the problem," said study senior author Fred A. Mettler Jr., M.D., radiologist from the Department of Radiology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
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In the wake of the report, medical societies and organizations enacted initiatives to increase awareness of exposure while equipment manufacturers developed more refined dose modulation technology. The effects of these and other efforts in the years since 2006 have remained largely unknown.

Armed with a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Mettler assembled a group of experts in medical imaging and physics and set out to determine the change in per capita radiation exposure in the U.S. from 2006 to 2016.

The results showed that the number of diagnostic and interventional radiology examinations performed remained largely unchanged over the 10-year period, even though the U.S. population increased by about 23 million. Estimated annual individual dose from diagnostic and interventional medical procedures fell from 2.9 millisieverts (mSv) in 2006 to 2.3 mSv in 2016, a decrease of approximately 20%.

"The overall trend stabilized, and the total dose to the U.S. population dropped a bit," Dr. Mettler said.

A key factor in the reduction was a substantial decrease in the number of nuclear medicine procedures, from 17 million in 2006 to 13.5 million in 2016. The decline was particularly notable in cardiology after a cut in Medicare reimbursement drove many cardiologists away from nuclear medicine-based procedures to stress echocardiography, a test that relies on ultrasound instead of ionizing radiation.

"Nuclear medicine basically fell off a cliff, possibly due to cardiologists discovering that reimbursement was way down and that, for cardiac ischemia and other indications, stress echocardiography is essentially as accurate as the nuclear medicine procedures," Dr. Mettler said.

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