UMEM Educational Pearls

Title: CT scanning, Cancer risk, and Administrative efforts

Keywords: CT scanning, cancer risk, administration, EMR, diagnostic algorithms (PubMed Search)

Posted: 4/23/2025 by Steve Schenkel, MPP, MD (Updated: 5/31/2025)
Click here to contact Steve Schenkel, MPP, MD

You may have seen the headline.

93 million CT examinations conducted on 62 million US patients in 2023 projected to lead to 103000 new cancer diagnoses accounting for 5% of new cancers.

The details of the modeling can be found here, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2832778.

What does this have to do with administration?

The solutions rely on administrative involvement:

Incorporation of readily available and easily used diagnostic algorithms at the point of care (which means well-integrated with the electronic medical record).
Ready availability of alternative diagnostic approaches such as ultrasound and MRI.
Implementation of low-dose scanning techniques along with shared awareness that such techniques are being used.
Support for shared decision making with patients and families.

There’s an editorial here, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2832782 and a commentary with interviews that put the findings nicely in context here https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/ct-scans-could-cause-5-of-cancers-study-finds-experts-note-uncertainty/ (including pointing out that lifetime risk of cancer in the US is 40% and the increase from CT scanning on the order of 0.1% / scan).

References

Smith-Bindman R, Chu PW, Firdaus HA, et al. Projected lifetime cancer risks from current computed tomography imaging. JAMA Intern Med 2025; doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.0505.