"NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Follow-up scans after treatment for testicular cancer don't appear to put men at higher risk of new tumors, researchers have found.
Overall, 14 percent of some 2,500 men who received multiple follow-up scans developed new tumors in the scanned area over the decade following their diagnosis. And those who received the most radiation were at no higher risk.
"Even with those incredibly high doses of diagnostic radiation, we did not identify any association between this exposure and an increased risk of cancers," study author Dr. Carl van Walraven at the Ottawa Health Research Institute told Reuters Health.
One concern with the findings, however, is that the researchers didn't follow the men very long, said Dr. David Brenner, a radiation expert at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, who was not involved in the new work.
On average, the men were only 35 when diagnosed with testicular cancer, and half were tracked for 11 years or less. Yet most radiation-induced cancers in young men "will actually appear 10 to 40 years post-radiation," said Brenner.
No sign scans after testicle cancer cause new tumors
