Heart patients often get repeated diagnostic imaging tests that expose them to dangerously high doses of radiation, US researchers said.
More than 30% of patients in a study who got an advanced type of stress test known as myocardial perfusion imaging, or MPI, were exposed to enough radiation to raise their risk of cancer, they said.
‘Efforts are needed to decrease this high cumulative dose and its potential attendant risks,’ Dr Andrew Einstein and colleagues wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The team from Columbia University Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York released their study at the American Heart Association meeting in Chicago.
It follows a study in July by at team at Yale University that found nearly one in 10 adults under 64 had a heart procedure involving radiation over a three-year period.
Radiation exposure from routine imaging tests has become a significant worry as advanced X-rays known as computed tomography, or CT scans, are more widely used.
A recent study pointed to myocardial perfusion imaging as a major source of radiation caused from medical imaging.
Dr Einstein's team wanted to see how much these common heart scans added to a patient's cancer risk.
The number of myocardial perfusion scans in the United States has increased from fewer than three million in 1990 to 9.3 million in 2002.
The test accounts for more than 10% of the entire cumulative radiation dose from all medical procedures excluding radiation treatments for cancer, the team reported.
Dr Einstein and colleagues analyzed data on more than 1,000 patients treated at Columbia University Medical Center in 2006.
