Researcher says whole body medical imaging scans have no medical benefit

• It sounds like a good idea: Regular computed tomography (CT) scans of the entire body, looking for aberrations that might signal early signs of disease.
• But a new study suggests these scans -- which cost about $900 apiece -- do little to boost long-term health, and might even undermine patient care.
• The study found that whole-body scans added just six days of life expectancy to the average 50-year-old male patient, and that each scan came with a high risk for false-positive findings that might necessitate further, expensive tests.
• "A very substantial portion of the total program cost would be related, then, to the work-up of these false positives, of absolutely no benefit to the patient," explained lead researcher Dr. G. Scott Gazelle, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School.
• Over the past few years, private radiology centers specializing in full-body CT examinations have sprung up across the country.
• According to Gazelle, consumers can expect to spend an average of $900 each for these scans, which are typically not covered by Medicare or private health plans.
• Because a real-life study into the cost and benefits was not feasible, the Harvard team turned instead to a detailed mathematical model to help determine the cost-effectiveness of full-body scans.
• Burdens on the health-care system would be even greater -- Gazelle's team calculated that the amount of full-body screening needed to gain one patient one extra year of life would cost the U.S. health-care system $151,000.
• "The whole concept of screening, for me, is one of raising people's consciousness about the fact that there's now a tool available to detect three of the major killers in our society -- heart disease, lung cancer and colon cancer," he said.