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Impacting change: radiation safety is on the radar in the cath lab

October 05, 2015
Dr. Andrea Natale
By: Dr. Andrea Natale

A physician’s impact on a patient’s life can be profound. The ability to improve lives is often the motivation for our life-long mission to educate and advance medicine and technology.

For more than two decades as an electrophysiologist, I have seen and participated in many advances in medicine that have not only benefited individual patients but moved the medical community to further explore potential new and innovative ways to improve lives.



My career decision to pursue electrophysiology instead of interventional cardiology has, in some ways, protected me from the higher levels of occupational radiation exposure that interventionalists receive.

Interventionalists typically work at high exposure levels because they need crisper images. Electrophysiologists tend to use lower frame rates because we don’t require X-ray images with extremely high resolutions. Although I believe electrophysiologists are at an advantage, it does not lessen my concern for the impact radiation exposure has on my health and that of my colleagues.

Thankfully, awareness of radiation exposure among physicians is growing.

Organizations like ORSIF – the Organization for Occupational Radiation Safety in Interventional Fluoroscopy – are doing their part to generate widespread awareness for issues of occupational health hazards related to chronic, low-level exposure to ionizing radiation. ORSIF, an industry and physician partnership, has taken on the responsibility to change the way people think about radiation exposure to drive the industry to develop tools to better protect patients and physicians alike. As part of ORSIF’s awareness efforts, a documentary was recently released featuring renowned cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Ted Diethrich and his personal health struggles as a result of being exposed to ionizing radiation. Years of exposure during procedures resulted in carotid artery disease, cataracts, and may have caused a brain tumor.

Many of my colleagues, including myself, are most concerned about the potential risk of cancer related to radiation exposure.

Studies have shown that ionizing radiation exposure in the United States rose 74%, on a per-capita basis, from the early 1980s to 2006. Nearly half of the exposure is related to medical imaging. The cumulative effects of radiation exposure are well documented. The lifetime exposure levels of physicians are much higher than for patients, and have been linked to cataracts and thyroid disease.

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