07/05/2025
At the recent conference in Egypt, I met doctors who had gotten our radiation protection hats at another conference in Bali last year. They said prior to using the hats, they had radiation induced headaches after doing 2 cases. This limited their work load but after wearing the hat they could do 3-4 cases a day without getting headaches. I believe this is radiation induced vasculopathy causing vascular narrowing leading to headaches. Another female doctor is using our hats to prevent radiation induced alopecia or hair loss.
For a long time, regulatory guidelines did not consider the brain to be radiation sensitive. This meant you could receive unlimited amounts of radiation to the head and it would not count towards your annual effective dose. Now that has changed to the minimum weight of 0.1.
We understand the biological and molecular mechanisms of radiation induced damage to the brain that can lead to cerebrovascular disease, brain tumors and neurodegenerative diseases. We should be doing more to protect the brain during procedures that use radiation. I wrote a paper on this topic a few years ago titled "Don't be Caught Half-dressed when Working with Radiation".
Studies have estimated lifetime occupational exposure to the left side of the head at 100,000 chest x-ray equivalents over the course of a career. If clinicians are getting acute symptoms such as headaches, think what decades of radiation exposure are doing to our brains. We need to change our culture to include protecting more parts of our bodies, especially the brain.
Stay safe.
