The investigators found no evidence that an annual physical will prevent death by cancer, cardiovascular disease or any other cause. Nor did they find any effect on hospital admissions, disability, additional visits to the doctor or absences from work.
The researchers, writing in the October issue of The Cochrane Library, found that health checkups have no effect on clinical events or other measures of morbidity. But one trial found an increased rate of diagnoses of hypertension and high cholesterol, the scientists noted, and another found a 20 percent increase in the number of new diagnoses per patient.
One possible harm, the authors point out, is that the checkups can lead to unnecessary treatment of conditions that would not cause symptoms or death.
The authors acknowledge that most of the studies are old, which may make the findings less applicable to modern health settings.
“We’re not concluding that prevention is useless,” said the lead author, Dr. Lasse Krogsboll, a researcher at the Cochrane Center in Copenhagen. “One possible reason we couldn’t find an effect is that primary care physicians might be doing a good job in preventing illness, so that adding a systematic effort does not add anything except perhaps harms.”
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