On the night of June 23, it was all hands on deck in the emergency department at Yale New Haven Hospital. They were running out of resuscitation rooms and breathing tubes. Patients were put in overflow rooms, and doctors and nurses came from other departments to keep up with the flood of patients. The pace was unrelenting—beginning at 4 p.m. and lasting for six hours. The emergency staff had never seen anything like this before.(more…)
Greater awareness and careful usage are bringing down the numbers of pediatric CT scans and cutting radiation exposure. Parents should weigh the benefits and risks.
(September 2013) If your child had a CT scan last year—perhaps to assess damage from a hockey injury or rule out appendicitis—he or she added to a huge statistic: more than 4 million pediatric CT scans were performed in the U.S in 2012.
The experience can leave you a little anxious, since the radiation from a CT scan may increase the risk of cancer, especially in children.
Fortunately, that picture may be changing, especially for children, who are even more susceptible to radiation-induced cancer than adults. In data compiled by the American College of Radiology’s Dose Index Registry, which tracks and categorizes the radiation given by CT scanners in U.S. hospitals, Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital(YNHCH) recorded the lowest doses of any academic hospital in the country in many age groups and types of pediatric radiation. (more…)
