With the Americans’ exposure to ‘radiation’ – resulting from imaging techniques like mammography and CT scans - having increased six times in the last thirty years, researchers at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have finally decided that reports about patients ‘radiation dose exposure’ should be included in their electronic medical records.

As per an article in the February edition of the Journal of the American College of Radiology (JACR), the NIH researchers expect the new move to contribute significantly to a more precise assessment of cancer linked to low-dose radiation exposure from medical imaging tests.

Noting that an appraisal of medical radiation exposure has found that nearly 1.5 to 2 percent of all US cancer cases are probably caused by “the clinical use of CT alone,” lead author David A. Bluemke said: “The cancer risk from low-dose medical radiation tests is largely unknown. Yet it is clear that the U. S. population is increasingly being exposed to more diagnostic-test-derived ionizing radiation than in the past.”

The radiation reporting policy proposed by the NIH researchers would not only help patients to keep record of their radiation dose exposure, but would also necessitate all leading radiation equipment vendors - selling imaging equipment to Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the NIH Clinical Center - to provide a means for recording radiation dose exposure in the electronic medical records of the patients.