Not a fan of annual physicals? Well, a new meta-analysis may give you a good excuse to skip it, since it seems they don t save lives after all.
For the meta-analysis, published online in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Lasse T. Krogsboll of the Cochrane Nordic Center in Copenhagen and co-authors examined 16 clinical trials involving 182,880 patients. The result? Patients who had annual general health checkups died at virtually the same rate as those who didn t. Furthermore, physicals failed to improve secondary endpoints such as hospital admissions, disability or absenteeism from work, the authors write.
"With the large number of participants and deaths included, the long follow-up periods used, and considering that cardiovascular and cancer mortality were not reduced, general health checks are unlikely to be beneficial," they added.
ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross says he s not surprised at the study. When he was a practising internist in the 1970s and 80s, doctors made a point to emphasize the importance of annual physicals. The theory was that preventive care would catch things earlier, and the earlier you catch it the earlier you can treat it and save lives.
But it hasn t really worked out that way, he says. There are actually few conditions that doctors can detect early enough to change the outcome. Those ailments include hypertension and high cholesterol but you don t need a doctor to test for those any longer. The local drugstore often has a BP test readily available, and cholesterol levels need to be checked only every few years unless quite abnormal. Nor are annual X-Rays or ECGs necessary.
In addition, annual checkups increase the likelihood of false positives that subject healthy people to needless additional testing, procedures and anxiety as they become patients in the medical establishment, Dr. Ross says.