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09 February 2012

Answer to Question #1375 Submitted to "Ask the Experts"

Category: Pregnancy and Radiation — Conception after exposures

The following question was answered by an expert in the appropriate field:

I am a 31-year-old healthy woman getting ready to get pregnant but I have some worries about some past radiation exposure. When I was four years old, I had urinary track reflux which was surgically fixed; however, during the diagnosis period, I was x rayed for about an hour each time to determine the cause of my illness and once operated on to determine if the surgery was successful. The x rays were directed at my reproductive organs as well since the bladder is located right there. Could there have been some damage done to my reproductive organs or even infertility because of this?

The likelihood of any risk from your x rays 27 years ago is very small for several reasons:

The usual procedure for fluoroscopic procedures such as yours is that the beam is on only a small fraction of the time. Although the procedure may have taken an hour, the x rays were on for very few minutes. Your dose was substantially less than you would have received from a full hour of beam on.
All available data from both human experience and animal studies indicate that any damage produced by x rays, even in doses much greater than yours, is repaired within a few weeks.
Even at large doses, only a fraction of the cells that would later develop into ova were damaged. The probability that one of these few potentially injured cells would produce a child is remote.
The overwhelming probability favors no injury from your x rays.

It must be kept in mind that a small percentage of children are born abnormal from spontaneous or unknown causes. While we cannot speak in absolute terms about anything regarding health or biology, the most likely outcome, by a wide margin, of your pregnancy will be a healthy baby. We wish you all the best. S. Julian Gibbs, DDS, PhD

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