Low Dose CT Scan to Detect Kidney Stones - Yale Medicine Explains
August 23, 2023Transcript
- 00:00[♪ slow music ♪]
- 00:08Kidney stones are a common disease process in the United States.
- 00:12Ten percent of Americans will get a kidney stone.
- 00:14When patients come to the emergency room or come to the urologist's office
- 00:17and they're having pain
- 00:18and there's a suspicion of kidney stones,
- 00:20majority of the time the diagnosis is made by getting a standard CT scan.
- 00:26Patients who have a kidney stone
- 00:27have a 50 percent chance of getting that stone again.
- 00:30It's often the case that kidney stone patients
- 00:33are getting many CAT scans
- 00:35in the many years of their lives.
- 00:38That CAT scan on average runs around 12 millisieverts.
- 00:48The radiation exposure is not something that you get
- 00:52and it washes out of your system.
- 00:54Radiation exposure is a cumulative thing.
- 00:57So, the more CAT scans,
- 00:59the more radiation exposure you get,
- 01:01can be very harmful,
- 01:04including developing cancers.
- 01:08Most of my work now is clinical research.
- 01:10How can we better understand how to treat certain patients?
- 01:14Our group recently proved
- 01:16that we were able to identify those patients
- 01:19who had kidney stones
- 01:21by exposing them to a type of CAT scan
- 01:23that has a very low dose of radiation exposure.
- 01:27We're reducing the radiation exposure by about 87 percent.
- 01:36Our hope is that
- 01:37disseminating this information,
- 01:39publishing and informing other clinicians about it,
- 01:43this will become more widely used.
- 01:45It's an area where research became part of everyday practice.
- 01:50This is what it's about.
- 01:51It's not about staying in place,
- 01:53it's about moving forward.
- 01:54It's about making things better.
- 01:55It's about making our understanding of medicine better.
- 01:58It's about making the patients' lives better
- 02:00by applying some of those techniques
- 02:02or those new drugs or those new technologies
- 02:05to improve patients' lives.