Can I keep the baby if I do CT during pregnancy?

Many women will try to keep fit during pregnancy to avoid getting sick, because it is very difficult to treat if they get sick during pregnancy, and taking medicine will have a particularly big impact on the baby. Some women need to do some medical examinations for unavoidable reasons, and these medical examinations have relatively high radiation. So, if you do a CT scan during pregnancy, can you still have the baby?

Normally, if you have an X-ray taken shortly before you become pregnant and then go to consult a doctor, even the top professors and experts will not tell you whether to keep the pregnancy or to abort it. The mobile phones, computers, televisions in our daily lives and the airplanes we take when traveling all have radiation, so don't blindly and ignorantly have an abortion just because of a single X-ray.

1. Effects of radiation on the fetus

Many of the examination methods used in medicine involve radiation, such as the most commonly used CT and X-ray. Both CT and X-ray examinations are ionizing radiation. Their characteristics are that they have high energy and can directly damage cells or change DNA structure, causing harm to the human body.

Pregnant women often worry about radiation during the early stages of pregnancy. Indeed, the early stages of pregnancy are a critical period for the development of fetal organs, and the harm caused by radiation at this stage may be the most serious. If a pregnant woman experiences radiation that exceeds a safe dose during early pregnancy, the following consequences may occur:

0-4 weeks of pregnancy: This is an "all or nothing stage" during which the baby will either survive or die if it is harmed by ionizing radiation.

5 to 8 weeks of pregnancy: This is the early stage of cell differentiation and the fetus will be more sensitive. But as long as it is controlled within a safe dosage, scientific research considers it to be safe;

8 to 15 weeks of pregnancy: This is the period when radiation has the greatest impact on the baby's intellectual development, but there is no need to panic.

Seeing this data, many pregnant mothers were surprised: Oh! It's so serious! Then why did the doctor recommend me to do a CT scan? If I do a CT scan, won't the baby be harmed? Don't worry, this is just the beginning. Pay attention to the word "safe dose" I used. There is a classic saying in medicine, called "talking about toxicity without considering the dose is just hooliganism."

2. Radiation Dose

Radiation dose is the key factor that creates danger. Medical research shows that radiation doses between 200 mGy and 400 mGy can affect fetal intelligence. We generally believe that ionizing radiation with a threshold below 50mGy will not cause adverse consequences such as miscarriage, teratogenesis, or impact on fetal intelligence. For commonly used examination items, the radiation dose does not exceed the upper limit of 50mGy. This means that routine examinations generally do not affect the fetus, unless the examinations are repeated over a long period of time, which may cause adverse consequences, but the possibility of the latter occurring during pregnancy is relatively small.