Lead aprons during X-rays offer no real protection — and may even increase risk, Czech doctors say

The Czech Ministry of Health and radiology experts say the lead aprons that have covered patients during X-rays for decades are now largely useless — and in some cases even harmful, as they can degrade image quality and prompt the machine to raise the radiation dose.

Lead shields first came into medical use between the 1920s and 1950s, when equipment was far less precise and fears about the effects of radiation exposure ran much higher. Back then, doctors worried above all about infertility and sought to shield patients' reproductive organs.

As Lucie Sukupová, a radiological physicist at the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine (IKEM), explained, the situation today is quite different: "The doses used in standard X-ray examinations are far below the threshold that could cause infertility."

According to her, the effective dose from a chest X-ray is roughly comparable to two or three days of natural background radiation that a person is exposed to anyway simply by living in the environment. By comparison, a ten-hour intercontinental flight delivers a dose of radiation comparable to — or even greater than — several chest X-rays.

The Ministry of Health stresses that the benefit of protective shields today is minimal, and in some cases they do more harm than good. "The downsides now outweigh the benefits," the ministry stated.

The problem lies in how modern digital X-ray machines are designed. They operate with significantly lower radiation doses and automatically adjust the exposure level depending on how much radiation the patient's body absorbs.

This is exactly where a protective apron can backfire. If the shield covers the area monitored by the automatic exposure control, the machine "concludes" that the patient's body is heavily attenuating the radiation and automatically increases the dose, Sukupová explained. As a result, instead of being protected, the patient ends up receiving a higher radiation dose than they would without the apron at all.

Despite this, many patients still insist on the familiar lead apron during X-rays, unaware that modern medicine is already moving away from the practice.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz