There certainly is this idea that having a test can help you prevent a heart attack, and I don't know where it came from. Dr Rita Redberg (University of California, San Francisco), "a leading critic of the scans," is quoted as saying, "No data suggest that there's any reason for anyone asymptomatic to have a test. . . . There certainly is this idea that having a test can help you prevent a heart attack, and I don't know where it came from."
And Dr Howard C Herrmann, director of interventional cardiology at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, says: "I find many patients have CT angiograms who shouldn't be getting CT angiograms."
Unnecessary scans expose patients to considerable radiation, an amount equal to more than 1000 chest X-rays, according to the journalists, whose numbers were estimated based on the scanning session of one patient featured in the story.
"Further, each scan creates an additional lifetime risk of cancer that is somewhere between 1 in 200 and 1 in 5000, said Dr David J Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University [New York]," the article states.
