Bakersfield Memorial says it overexposed patients to radiation
| Tuesday, Aug 03 2010 06:45 PM
Last Updated Tuesday, Aug 03 2010 06:45 PM
Bakersfield Memorial Hospital said Tuesday that it exposed 16 potential stroke patients to higher-than-recommended levels of radiation despite following guidelines provided by the manufacturer of its CT scanner diagnostic imaging machine.
"We have notified all the patients involved and their treating physicians, and no adverse effects have been reported," said the written statement by hospital President and CEO Jon Van Boening.
The hospital said it reported the overdoses to state regulators in February following an alert put out in November by the California Department of Public Health in response to findings that an unnamed facility exposed 200 patients to eight times the expected level over an 18-month period.
Memorial's vice president of business development, Gary Frazier, the hospital employee who took news media calls on the matter Tuesday, said he did not know how much radiation patients there received. But he said he assumed to be correct a July 31 report in the New York Times stating that Memorial's 16 patients "received up to five and a half times too much" radiation.
Memorial's staff went through records covering more than a year to determine who all may have been affected, Frazier added.
The procedure that led to the overexposures, called a Computed Tomography brain perfusion, is mainly intended to help medical providers determine whether a person has suffered a stroke.
An overdose of radiation to the head can cause confusion and headaches, and over many years could lead to cancer and brain damage. Patients overexposed as part of a brain perfusion often suffer hair loss in a ring around their head.
Possible stroke patients were overexposed to radiation during brain perfusion scans at at least four Los Angeles County hospitals -- Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, Glendale Adventist Medical Center and Providence St. Joseph Medical Center -- the Los Angeles Times reported.
Memorial has one of Bakersfield's two stroke centers. A spokeswoman at the city's other stroke center, at San Joaquin Community Hospital, said none of its patients had been exposed to higher-than-recommended radiation levels.
Late last year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration opened an investigation into perfusion-related radiation after reports that several hospitals around the country had overexposed patients.
A spokesman for the agency said he could not discuss Bakersfield Memorial because of the investigation. He noted that no widely accepted national standard exists for how much radiation patients should be exposed to during a brain perfusion, and that people should reserve judgment until a final report on the investigation is released within the next couple of months.
"Until our investigation is final and released, we have to have an open mind," spokesman Dick Thompson said. "Is this an error associated with the machine? A design error? A user error? And primarily, is it an error at all?"
Toshiba, maker of the CT scanner Bakersfield Memorial used, said in a written statement that it could not comment on specific cases because the FDA's investigation continues. But it added that the company continues to work with its customers to "educate them on the dose reduction technologies" on Toshiba CT scanners.
Richard A. Patterson, a Valencia lawyer representing more than 100 people allegedly overexposed to brain perfusion radiation -- none of them from Bakersfield Memorial -- said doctors sometimes misdiagnose these patients, thinking their symptoms were caused by a stroke rather than the overdose of radiation.
"They basically go undetected," he said.
