MassTortDefense has posted about medical monitoring claims. One of the advantages plaintiffs may have with juries in such claims is the pre-loaded notion that early detection is “always” better; therefore, screening tests must be helpful, right? Jurors are inundated with messages from public health authorities, government agencies, insurers and others about getting this or that screening test. The latest we saw: get your husband a colo-rectal screening for Christmas.

Undoubtedly, preventive care is crucial, and early detection by some tests of some disease has been shown to save lives. But not every test regime conjured up by plaintiffs’ attorneys or their experts for a class of litigants falls into the same category as tests recommended for specific populations by, for example, the US Preventive Services Task Force.

Defendants need to explore the argument that a proposed monitoring test may do more harm than good. Proposed tests have potential side effects, risks. For example, researchers are looking at the risks posed by CT scans.

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston told a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago last week that as many as 7 percent of patients from a large U.S. hospital system had enough radiation exposure from CT scans during their lifetime to noticeably raise their risk of cancer. CT scans help diagnosis of a variety of illness and injuries, and are routinely used to track the advance of cancer. But a number of recent studies have raised alarms about the potential cancer risks from the radiation. The BWH group studied all patients who had a CT scan in 2007 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, or at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston. Then they checked on prior CT scans from a database that includes 20+ years of patient history and calculated overall radiation exposure based on the type and location of the scan. This allowed them to determine a lifetime risk. They found about 7 percent of the patients did have a cancer risk that increased by at least 1 percent over the baseline cancer rate.

And that’s for symptomatic patients using the scans. For them, the radiation exposure from CT scans may be worth the risk. But for non-symptomatic, healthy plaintiffs who claim some often unverified level of exposure to a toxic substance, getting repeated CT scans under a medical monitoring regime could raise their risk of a tumor. And certain groups are more likely to be harmed by radiation, including younger people whose growing tissues may be more vulnerable according to some studies.

A typical CT scan can deliver 50 to 100 times more radiation than a conventional X-ray, depending on the site being examined and the type of the machine. Some 62 million CT scans are done in the U.S. annually.