Have I had too much radiation will it give me cancer?

The answer to your question about whether or not you will get cancer caused by the radiation from your x-rays and CT scans is that it is quite unlikely, but not impossible. The answer for how much higher your risk of cancer is requires knowledge about your baseline risk for cancer and depends upon the amount of radiation your received and some factors about you: such as where you received the radiation (i.e. was it a CT of abdomen, brain, etc) and how old you were when you received it.

So first, it is important to realize, that now-a-days with people living much older and being otherwise healthier in terms of infections and heart/lung problems etc., the lifetime risk of getting cancer is approximately 40% for any individual. Most of this risk is in elderly people, and the risk of any individual getting cancer prior to age 50 is still quite low. What this means overall is that regardless of whether or not you had x-rays and CT scans, there is still a significant chance that any individual who lives long enough will eventually get some kind of cancer – this is simply the way the body works. FYI: The most important thing that anyone can do to lower their risk of cancer is to not smoke (or stop smoking). Smoking causes more cancers than every other known cause of cancer combined, and the increased risk with radiology tests is negligible compared with the increased risk from smoking.

As someone who is used to treating cancer with radiation, I frequently get asked the question: will this radiation increase the risk of new cancers. The answer when using radiation to TREAT cancer is yes, there is a small increased risk. As an example when we treat lymphoma, to the upper half of the body, there is an increased risk of breast cancer of about 10% in the next 30 years. For almost all other sites, the increased risk of developing cancer from treating radiation is about 0.5-1%.

There are three important things to note.:
1. The first is that the dose we use when treating cancer with radiation is much larger than the radiation you get with a CT scan. i.e. we typically use between 4000 and 6000 cGy (centigray). In contrast a CT scan of the abdomen – which has a "lot" of radiation for a diagnostic test probably gives about 5 cGy. In comparison a chest X-ray wil give much less at about 0.1 cGy. In units that correspond more to the risk of cancer for a particular organ, an abdominal CT gives 10 mSv (milli-Sieverts), a head CT gives 2mSv, and a chest X-ray (CXR) gives 0.1 mSv. It is estimated that the increased risk of cancer is about 5% per Sievert. So for 1 abdominal CT there is an increased risk of about 0.05% and for 1 CXR there is an increased risk of about 0.0005%.
2. The exact risk will also depend upon the age when you get the radiation/test. It is well known that the slight increase in cancer risks are larger in those younger (say <25 years) than in those older (say >50). It is for this reason that physicians are more comfortable performing diagnostic tests on adults than on kids.
3. The part of the body being tested counts. i.e. a chest x-ray is different from a CT of the head and the risk of any effects – including cancer – only occur where your received yoru radiation. So if you had a barium swallow, and a ct scan of your head, they would not act on the same part of hte body and there for not work togetehr to increase any risk.

In the end though there is always a small (albeit very small) increased risk in the tests that you get. Imagining the worst case scenario that you received 20 abdo CT scans when you were a young child (so ~ double your risk) and your increase in risk would still only be about:

20 scans x 0.01Sv/scan x 5%/Sv x2 = 2% or a lifetime increased risk of 2% of getting a radiation induced cancer. Much smaller than the overall risk of getting cancer!

hope this helps

Yes, x-rays and ct scans should be a concern for the on-set of cancer. This is not my opinion. Read some of these medical reports:

http://www.iarc.fr/ENG/Press_Releases/pr170a.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8080742

or this one
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8080742
where CT scans are never recommended to detect lung cancer in patients that are none smokers (read: too dangerous for non-smokers, but benefits outweigh risks for detecting lung cancer in smokers).

I would definitely be asking my doctor the risks involved due to a history of having xrays/CT scans, etc. What other options might be available? And definitely…get more than one opinion!

There’s many more reports you can look up. Just copy and paste this:

"xray exposure +cancer stats"

into any Google search (or any search engine), and many reports will come up from different medical institutes.