I'm seeing a dentist tomorrow who is insisting on full mouth x-rays as part of the initial consultation. Since I've just gone through 6 weeks of radiation, including head/neck x-rays once a week, I'm wondering what are the risks for ORN or other bad effects from the additional radiation? What is the lifetime max? Where can I find out?

Many thanks,
Riley

Never mind. My RO's office finally called back and said 'there's no limit to dental x-rays-you can have all you need'.

Just as a side note: radiation doses are lifetime accumulative, so everything that you get; treatments, all your follow up scans, dental xrays, etc. all add up. Assuming that you get follow up scans the rest of your life after treatment it all adds up. At some point in time radiation begins to cause its own malignancies. For instance by year ten of survival, approximately 3% of all patients with the maximum treatment levels of radiation develop osteosarcomas of the mandible. This study and statistic was done before the mass implementation of IMRT, so hopefully these numbers will go down. Many dentists now have digital xray machines that expose you to 1/10th the amount of radiation of normal dental xrays. If your dentist doesn't have one of these machines, another dentist in town does have it. As to lifetime doses and more, I am going to leave those answers to Gary who has forgotten more about radiation than I know.

I ask and the dentist(s) tell me not to worry since it is such a small dose. If they don't use digital, I opt out. If you are on regulary CAT scans versus PET/CT your exposure is even greater.

Ed