Checked your brain?
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From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I'm Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
Some healthy people with no symptoms to indicate they have disease in their brains buy brain scans to see if they might have something they don't know about.
However, a researcher says people who haven't been referred by a doctor and don't have symptoms might be doing themselves a disservice. Rustam Al-Shahi Salman of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland bases that on data from almost 20,000 scans of people who didn't have symptoms.
Salman found about 3 percent had something unusual. But he says this doesn't imply they need brain surgery:
[Rustam Al-Shahi Salman speaks] "This is a particularly important consideration because the treatments for these abnormalities such as aneurysms and benign tumors may do harm as well as good."
The study in the British Medical Journal included data supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Learn more at hhs.gov.
HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.
Last revised: October, 13 2009