Body Scans: Help or Hype?

If you've listened to the radio or read a newspaper lately, you know the pitch: Get a full body scan. Take control of your health. Save your life. The commercials are so convincing, you wonder if you are neglecting your health if you don't get scanned. Are the scans, which can cost $500 or more and aren't typically covered by insurance, help or hype?

According to a new study, the pitches for whole body scans don't always provide balanced information. Researchers from Stanford University's Center for Biomedical Ethics analyzed 40 print ads and 20 brochures for whole body scans done with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT). They found 38 percent of the ads and 25 percent of the brochures contained statements that lacked clear scientific evidence.

Okay, so the pitches can be exaggerated. But should you get a scan anyway, and possibly catch cancer, heart disease and other ailments in their early, curable stages? According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, full body CT scans offer no proven benefits for healthy people. In a brochure on the topic, the FDA states, "At this time the FDA knows of no scientific evidence demonstrating that whole body scanning of individuals without symptoms provides more benefit than harm to people being screened." The FDA's advice is to discuss the risks and benefits with your physician.

Professional associations for radiologists are also against full body scans in healthy people. Currently, the American College of Radiology's stand is that it does not believe there is "sufficient evidence to justify recommending total body CT screening for patients with no symptoms or a family history suggesting disease."

"From our perspective there is no scientific proof that having one of these scans gives you any longer or better quality life," says James Borgstede, MD, chair of the board of chancellors of the American College of Radiology and clinical professor of radiology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, in Denver.

But, he adds, the radiology organization does support research to determine if the scans can detect disease in those at risk. For instance, Borgstede says, if you have a person who is a smoker and wants to participate in research to see if the scan could detect cancer in its early stages, "we think that is appropriate."

"A screening test should do no harm," says Matthew Budoff, MD, director of cardiac CT at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California, and associate professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, who believes part of the backlash against the whole body scanning has to do with the fact that much of it is done with high-radiation scanners. He says the published scientific data about scanning the heart to find disease is excellent and that the data on the value of lung scans is good. There is little to no data supporting the use of abdominal scans, he says.

Budoff says if you're going to do it, the key is to use the right scanner. "Whole body scans can be done with an electron beam CT scanner, a lower-radiation version used more for cardiac work than general scanning of the body," he says.