Computer tomography scans, or CT scans, are an invaluable tool for diagnosing cancer and other conditions. But in a cruel twist, the medical imaging technique may be more harmful than once thought, causing alarming rates of the destructive disease as it's overused, a team of researchers from the US and the UK have found.

Their findings, published as a provocative study in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, indicate that CT scans could cause five percent of all cancers in the US, where 93 million CT scans were performed on 62 million patients in 2023.