According to a recent study, people requiring dialyses are under a huge risk of exposure to large doses of radiation which creates a high risk of developing cancer.

This study was published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology and it stated that the problem does not lie with the dialysis itself which is just a process to clean the blood of impurities but with all the tests a patient undergoes during the treatment.

Marco Brambilla of Maggiore della Carità University Hospital in Novara, Italy, said that more than 60% of the tests provided no useful information. She believed that younger dialysis patients and those on transplant wait-lists were exposed to the largest doses of radiation.

The researchers opined that most of the radiation exposure was caused during CT scans in which the patient was exposed to around 100 times the radiation of a traditional X-ray.

Official data suggests that around 38,000 people are on dialysis for treatment of kidney failure, which indicates that the patients are undergoing a considerable number of tests that could hike their cancer risk.

“Certain types of procedures are overused because they are relatively easy to perform and a large amount of information is provided very quickly”, Dr. Brambilla wrote. “The particular example described here, that of CT scans, can produce substantial cumulative doses of radiation when used multiple times”.