Galveston County Daily News, May 1, 2007 By Howard Brody GALVESTON - This column just got more complicated as it went along. I started out with an article in the journal Radiology by Dr. Christoph I. Lee and colleagues, from Yale. They were concerned that patients coming through the emergency room could end up having unnecessary CT ("cat") scans without anyone informing them of the risks from the doses of radiation they were getting. They calculated that a CT scan of the abdomen gives the body a radiation that is the equivalent of between 100 and 250 chest X-rays. But they found that only seven percent of the patients said they had been told this. And relatively few of the ER docs could correctly state what the radiation dose was, or what this did to the patient's lifetime risks of getting cancer. So, bottom line, Lee and colleagues argued that few patients were making informed choices in the ER about recommended imaging tests.