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Your doctor suggested an x-ray study to you. It will be carried out with your consent. You have indeed the right to accept or refuse it. The radiologist is qualified to judge whether this examination is useful to answer to the diagnosed problem raised by your doctor. Though, this examination may not solve it all.

Radiology uses x-rays

Regarding the patients' irradiation, no danger had been shown for the patients as small doses are used and precautions are taken to limit to an absolute minimum the examined zone. For example, a simple film corresponds to an average natural exposure (sun) when flying during 4 hours. Nevertheless, for pregnant women, precautions have to be taken systematically: this is the reason why you have to mention if you are in this case.

What is it?

This machine allows to take cross-sectional images of the human body. Information given by this exam are often essential to get a precise diagnosis. The scanner uses x-rays.

Progress of the examination

Alone in the exam room, you will be lying down on the back (most of the time) on a bed that moves into a large ring. We can communicate with you thanks to a microphone. The team is quite close to you, behind a window. They can see and hear you during all the exam. They can intervene, if need be. Pending on the examined zone, your arms will be along your body or behind your head. The exam is generally quick. You have to cooperate : you must try to stay still; in some cases, we may ask you, via the microphone, to stop breathing for a few seconds. Some exams require - depending on the cases - an intravenous injection most of the time inside the elbow, to drink or have an enema.

Which products are used and what you will feel

Radiopaque iodine-containing products will be used. The type of product and its way of being injected will be adapted to your case by the radiologist. This choice will depend mainly on the infos about your health state you gave him prior to the exam. You will feel no pain in most of the cases.

Though, in case of intravenous injection, you may feel heat at the moment of injection or a strange taste in your mouth.

Any danger due to the injection?

Any intervention on the human body, even carried out in the best security and competence conditions has room for complication.
Injections are usual procedures and generally well tolerated. Nevertheless, reactions may happen, like with any other medicine. The shot may lead to a small and minor hematoma that will resolve itself within a few days. During the injection, under the pressure, a leak of the product may occur under the skin near the vein.

This complication is rare - a case in hundreds of injections, generally without serious consequence - a local treatment may then be exceptionally carried out.

The injection of iodine-containing product may lead to an intolerance reaction. These unpredictable reactions occur to patients who already had a poorly tolerated injection of one of these products or with allergy background. They are mainly transitory and harmless. They may be more severe with cardiorespiratory dysfunction and then a compulsory treatment.

Very serious complications are rare : for further information, risk of death is less than one case in 100000 i.e. 14 times less than being killed within a year in a car accident. Kidney problems also linked to the iodine-containing product are possible for patients with diseases
fragilizing their kidneys (chronic kidney failure, diabetes with kidney failure, etc ...).