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I appreciate Dr. Vakil's helpful summary of the risks attendant with radiological imaging. Given the difficulty of determining the absolute risk of a given procedure from the radiation exposure alone, I usually find it helpful to use a calculator which takes into account a patient's age and sex in addition to their radiation exposure. In this manner, it is possible to estimate a baseline cancer risk for a given patient, as well as the additional risk that might be expected from an x-ray or CT scan. For example, using the calculator at http://www.xrayrisk.com/calculator/calculator.php, I can estimate that a 50 year old male patient who is considering a CT scan of the abdomen can expect his future probability of cancer to increase by 0.04%. This translates into a number needed to harm (NNH) of 2472.
When considering that the additional cancer risk posed by a radiological procedure is likely to only manifest many years in the future, without a clear causal link to the inciting event, the individual patient may be more likely to undergo a necessary imaging test if they know the absolute numbers involved.
Competing Interests: None declared.