Dangers of radiation doses to children

DAYTON, OH (WDTN) - High-tech body scans help doctors save lives. The three dimensional x-rays are extremely common and valuable. But new research raises a lot of concern about the dangers of all that radiation to children. 2 NEWS is On Your Side with what you need to know to protect your child from what could be toxic exposure.

Nine-year-old Emily Ware walks the halls of Children's Medical Center often. With badge in hand, this junior nurse helps out in the hematology and oncology clinic, where she's also a patient. She's fighting cancer now for the third time. The CT room is also a familiar place to Emily. "It helps them know how I'm doing inside my body, " she said. Emily's talking about a CT scan. That's short for computed tomography. A machine can quickly take several x-rays from several angles, giving doctors volumes of information.

"How much tumor does she have and where is it. Does she need additional therapy, chemotherapy or radiation to treat the cancer and make her cancer free," are all questions Dr. Elizabeth Ey of Dayton Children's Medical Center said she hope to answer with the scan.  But this information comes at a price: radiation exposure.

There is a lot of concern about what that exposure can do adults and fear of what it means for children who often receive the same doses of radiation as people three times their size. "Childrens tissue are much more sensitive, because they're younger and children don't need as much radiation to penetrate their body parts." Ey said.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, some of these machines are giving patients four times the amount of radiation than first thought. Dayton Children's Medical Center always dials down that dose for its patients, without lowering the clarity of the scan. Even so, Dr. Ey says we need to make sure kids only get scans when they're absolutely necessary. "If we decide to do a CT in a child we need to be sure we use the proper technique," Ey said. "To use as little radiation as possible to make a good diagnosis. Too much radiation can cause sunburn. Prolonged radiation exposure can give us skin cancer."

Research shows medical radiation may be responsible for 29,000 new cases of cancer a year. Unfortunately, for Emily part of her cancer treatment includes regular CT scans.

So, as parents, what do you do? Dr. Ey urges you to ask a lot of questions about any scan your child may need and to make sure you understand the problem you want to diagnosis.  Be sure your child is getting a pediatric low dose of radiation. And make sure the facility is certified by the American College of Radiology. Also ask if there are alternatives to a CT scan.

Medical experts do point out that individual cancer cases linked to CT scans are less than one in one thousand.