Danger of Using SPECT Scan to Diagnose ADHD

Written by Thom Hartmann

SPECT scans are dangerous to children or adults with ADHD, and can cause cancer 10 or 20 years down the road even when only used once to "diagnose" ADHD. Here's how it works.

Are SPECT scans dangerous to children or adults when used to "diagnose" ADHD?

Imagine you're in one of those huge hotels with hundreds of windows facing out onto the parking lot. You walk to the window and look down and see a man with a rifle, waving it around as if he were thinking of spraying the entire building with bullets. And then you see the muzzle flash at the end of the rifle's barrel, hear the crack sound of the shot, and, a half-second later, the shattering sound of glass somewhere off to your right on that huge wall of glass.

Given that situation, would you get away from the window? Would you feel "safe"?

What if the hotel had a thousand windows instead of a few hundred, and you knew the shooter could only fire a few bullets before he ran out of ammunition?

What if the shooter was actually doing something that the hotel had requested - say, shooting pigeons off the roof because they were pesky or carried disease - and every now and then he missed the pigeons and hit a window? Would you feel safer because there was a reason for his shooting? Would you continue to stand in the window, knowing the odds were low that you'd be hit and the shooting was useful for the hotel's bird problem?

Better yet, would you put a child in the line of fire?

In order to make sense of this analogy, consider for a moment how radiation causes cancer.

The replication of cells is controlled by a small segment along a DNA double-helix. When something hits or damages the DNA in the cell, usually the cell simply dies. This is happening right now in millions of cells in your body as you read these words. The body is all set for it, with scavenger systems in place that recycle the cell's nutrients.

Occasionally, however, instead of DNA being hit in ways that kill off the cell, that one little window on the DNA strand that controls its reproduction gets damaged. The cell loses its ability to know when to stop reproducing, and starts dividing as fast as it can. This is called cancer.

The four main things in our world that "hit" DNA in ways that cause it to become non-reproducible (and also leading to the cell's demise) or super-reproducing (cancer) are oxygen-bearing chemicals (called "free radicals" or "oxidizers"), DNA-toxic chemicals (called "carcinogens," with the chemicals in cigarette smoke being the most familiar to most people), DNA-reproduction-stimulating compounds (called "hormones" and the hormone-mimickers such as those found in certain plasticizers, pesticides, and sun-blocking chemicals) and ionizing radiation (the most well-known being UV radiation in sunlight, which causes skin cancer, and X-rays, which can cause cancer anywhere).

In part because our sunlight has become more lethal in the past 50 years and our environment and foods filled with industry-created carcinogens and hormones, one-in-two men and one-in-three women will get cancer in their lifetimes. We take anti-oxidant vitamins like C and E to reduce the damage, eat natural foods to avoid the chemicals, and wear sun-block, all in efforts to avoid damage to our DNA that might flip "on" the reproduction switch in a cell so it turns to cancer.

Radioactivity is Not Only Dangerous, It Can Be Deadly

I remember when I was a child, walking home from school in the first grade in 1956. There was a shoe store on the way, and they had a really cool machine that I stuck my feet into dozens of times so I could see the bones in my toes and how the tissues of my foot fit my shoe. A friend of mine, now deceased from thyroid cancer, had radioactive radium pellets put into her sinus' to stop recurrent sore throats and tonsillitis. My mother was encouraged to step out of the house and into a truck that traveled around giving women breast x-rays. And they were exploding bombs above the ground in Nevada so frequently that more radiation was released on America than we released on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

We've learned a lot since 1956. The shoe-store fluoroscopes are banned, doctors don't use radium anymore to treat sore throats, and almost all aboveground nuclear testing has been halted worldwide. We're even recommending that women under 40 not get annual mammograms, in part because of concern that the radiation from the x-rays may cause more cancer than it would find. A study cited in Science News a decade or more ago reported a correlation between the number of dental x-rays a person had as a child and the development of cancers of the mouth and neck in adult years, leading dentists to begin wrapping people's necks with lead aprons and to use tighter-beamed x-ray machines now in most dental practices (with a square, adjustable "gun" instead of a round scattershot beam).

The Impact of Radiation on Humans

Much of our current knowledge of the impact of radiation on humans comes from pioneering work done by Dr. John Gofman, Professor Emeritus of Medical Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Lecturer at the Department of Medicine, University of California School of Medicine at San Francisco. In the 1940s, while still a graduate student at Berkeley, Gofman made an international name for himself in the field of nuclear physics when he co-discovered protactinium-232 and uranium-232, protactinium-233 and uranium-233, and proved the slow and fast neutron fissionability of uranium-233, which made possible atomic bombs.

After receiving his PhD in nuclear physics, he went to work for the US Government to help develop the atomic bomb, and invented, along with Robert Oppenheimer and Robert Connick, the currently used process for extracting plutonium from irradiated uranyl nitrate. The bomb project finished, Gofman went back to college, this time to get his MD in 1946. In 1947, he transformed the world of heart disease prevention and treatment by developing a new flotation ultracentrifugal technique that discovered low-density lipoproteins (LDL) and high-density lipoproteins (HDL), and then he conducted the first prospective study demonstrating that high LDLs (also known as "bad cholesterol") presented a risk for heart disease and high HDLs (also now known as "good cholesterol") demonstrated a resilience against heart disease. He literally wrote the book on heart disease that's still today used in medical schools, "Coronary Heart Disease," published in first edition in 1959.