Image Gently: a campaign to reduce children's and adolescents' risk for cancer during adulthood

Recently, the Cancer Prevention Across the Lifespan workgroup at the Centers for Disease Control held a workshop entitled "Identifying Opportunities for Cancer Prevention During Pre-Adolescence and Adolescence." With the goal of raising awareness and developing community and policy interventions to decrease risk factors for cancer, one session highlighted the danger of ionizing radiation exposure from diagnostic medical imaging. This session focused on the Image Gently campaign, which is a multidisciplinary partnership focused on increasing awareness, developing education materials, and advocating for children to protect them from unnecessary radiation. Such protection is important because emerging data suggest that preadolescents and adolescents may be at increased risk for future malignancy if they are exposed to radiation from diagnostic imaging. Many health care practitioners may not understand how to decrease children's radiation exposure; the goals of Image Gently are to increase all stakeholders' understanding of these risks and to encourage radiation reduction strategies. Clearly, diagnostic imaging is an important and necessary tool for certain medical care. Image Gently advocates methods to reduce the use of unnecessary ionizing radiation by sharing best practices of imaging protocols for children and using alternative imaging that avoids ionizing radiation. This article summarizes our recent presentation on Image Gently to this workgroup: It focuses on the risks for preadolescents and adolescents and on strategies to minimize these risks.