Because research has shown that one in 10 adults under age 65 in the US are exposed to radiation during cardiac imaging over a three-year period, it becomes important to address the question of how much radiation is too much for your heart?

Researchers analyzed administrative claims from the major US insurer, United Healthcare, for more than 90,000 adults that had at least one cardiac imaging procedure. It was discovered that 89 per 1,000 patients received a dose of ionizing radiation greater than that of exposure to background radiation from natural sources. Dr. Jersey Chen of Yale University and colleagues report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology that extrapolation of this data suggests that over a half million people would be at risk from considerable doses of ionizing radiation from cardiac imaging.

But what does this mean to each individual’s health? The clinical implications are vague considering that catching and treating heart problems may be balancing out the cancer risks associated with ionizing radiation.

Because cardiac imaging accounts for about 30% of total annual exposure to radiation from medical testing, these results should at least give cardiologists pause when selecting testing methods. However, it remains important to acknowledge that the correlation between radiation doses and cancer development remains hypothetical.

Regardless, in light of these recent findings, researchers suggest that alternative imaging modalities without ionizing radiation may be the better choice for diagnosing younger patients.

“For example, alternatives such as stress echocardiography or, in some cases, exercise testing alone without imaging could serve as alternatives to myocardial perfusion imaging scans,” they wrote in JACC.