What are the long-term effects of lots of x-rays nowadays?

I’m not looking for medical advice, nor am I looking for tinfoil hat google searches. I’m wondering what the effects of x-rays are using current medical equipment and modern x-ray techniques. Are they cumulative - the more x-rays, the more effects? Does it depend on the age of the patient?


That’s the question, here’s the context:

This is a past issue for me, it’s not bearing on a current or future medical decision re: x-rays. WhyBaby was a micropreemie, and in the hospital on a vent for many weeks. Every day or two, she’d get an x-ray to make sure her breathing tube was in the right place, as well as other x-rays to check for other things. Of course, given the situation, the decision was easy - the benefits of lots of x-rays far outweighed the immediate risks. The doctors and I both agreed on this without any discussion at all of what the long-term or developmental risks might be, because we were all focused on keeping her alive in the moment, not worried about long-term health.

But now that she’s older and healthy, is there anything I and her doctor should be extra curious about and on the lookout for? Should she get special cancer screens, or bone density tests, or anything besides the normal kid physicals as she grows? Her doctor is good, but she’s young, and doesn’t specialize in preemies (they told me at the hospital that a specialist wasn’t needed), and I’m the kind of person who likes to know stuff on my own, even if I never need it.

The SDMB resident radioligist may come by to provide more exact information.
Until then: Film is more sensitive, thus x-ray intensity and exposure time has been drasticaly reduced resulting in far less tissue damage per exposure.

The book I have here* says that diagnostic radiology provides* on average* 220 microseiverts per year. This is 90% of dose from man made sources of radiaion (on average).

Putting this in perspective, cosmic radiation at sea level on the equator is 200 and at 10 000 feet it is 1000 microseiverts per year.
From terrestrial sources (rocks) you are looking at 200 to 1000 microseiverts per year.
From your own body from potassium-40 is 200 microseiverts per year. Other radionuclides in the body can get this up to over 1000 microseiverts per year.

The most susceptable regions of the body to X-ray exposure are bone marrow, gonads and foetus.
*An introduction to Radiation Protection