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Old 8th Dec 2017, 12:11
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noblues
 
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Thanks for the replies:

My AME doesn't have an issue as the spinal consultant has written saying my symptoms are extremely likely due to my cervical disc herniation rather than anything cardiac.

I suppose personally I still have a small element of doubt!

I have been in touch with the radiologist who would do the CT Angiogram and has gone some way to reassure me about the radiation dosage which would be 3mSv. (Yes this used to be much higher with older machines).

To put that in perspective:
A dental X-ray is 0.005 mSv
A chest X-ray is 0.1 mSv

100mSv seems to be the recommended lifetime allowance, but having something blasting radiation at my heart muscle might well come back to haunt me in decades time.

421dog : Are you a cardiologist? Thanks for your other suggestions.

This is a quote from the radiologist who would do the scan:
I can understand your concerns with respect to radiation dose from the CT scan. At Paul Strickland Scanner Centre we use the latest CT scanner (Siemens Force dual source). Our average doses for cardiac CT scans range from 1.4 to 3 mSv. You can compare this with our natural background exposure of about 3 mSv every year, which we all receive. For someone in their middle age, the life time risk of cancer with a radiation dose of 5 mSv is about 1:4000. If you have a CT scan once a while (say once in 5 years), in my view the risk of getting any cancer during your life time from radiation itself is very low (except that one-third of us will die of a cancer any way- our natural risk, while 40% of us will die from cardiovascular disease).
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