Private health checks Private health scans: the concerns

Again posing as a customer, we phoned four companies (Prescan, Lifescan, Preventicum and the European Scanning Centre) offering health checks including MRI and/or CT scans to see what information and advice they gave.

The companies our undercover researchers visited didn’t offer scans as part of an MOT, but this was the area that most concerned our expert panel, so we phoned four that offer MRI and/or CT scans, posing as a customer.

Potential harm from scans

Our experts had concerns about who has CT scans

CT scans use radiation. Independent expert advisory group Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE) said that if 100,000 people underwent a typical dose CT scan every five years from the age of 40 to 70, approximately 240 would die as a result of those scans. 

Annual scans would potentially result in 1,200 deaths. 

COMARE recommends that companies stop full-body CT scanning immediately because it believes the harm outweighs the benefit.

Our panel members agreed: ‘Scans on people without symptoms are at best of unproven benefit, and at worst – in the case of CT scans – positively dangerous’.

False positives

MRI scans use magnetic fields and radio waves. Consultant Neurologist Dr Rustam Al-Shahi Salman says because they are so sensitive, one in 37 people who do not have symptoms of brain disease will have an abnormality of uncertain significance found on a brain MRI scan.

This means that people may be left with an impossible decision about whether to have a risky operation that may be unnecessary, or live with a frightening ‘ticking time bomb’.