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how often do i need to undergo full body scan?

as u know early detection of cancer can save your life. the best way to detect this is via MRI or PET-CT scans which are not 100% neutral to health how often do i need to do them to make sure i do not detect cancer at the stage where it's too late?

Public Comments

1. Your doctor can determine if you have any risk factors but most things are set up for certian age groups and some tests are not healthy for the very young..........so let a Doctor advise you
2. most people don't undergo regular full body scans to look for cancer. your health insurance won't cover it unless a doctor recommends it. They are pretty expensive tests, and some involve nuclear medicine, which isn't something you just do for the heck of it. At certain age intervals, detection screening can take place - like women having mammograms at age 35+ or men having prostate exams. But a full body scan to look for cancer every where is not a routine exam that is performed.
3. Unfortunately even imagining tests can not always detect cancer. The problem is with tumor size. PET, CT, MRI do not adquately pick up any malignancy that is microscopic or under 1cm. Furthermore unless you know exactly where to look on a full body scan . . looking for a cancerous tumor is like looking for a single needle in a haystack . . you can't find it unless you know where its located. Even than a PET, CT, and MRI can produce unreliable images . . false positives or worse totally miss the cancer. As tools in the battle agains cancer a PET, CT, MRI and other imaging techniques are often limited and fail to give cancer patients and their doctors an accurate estimate of how much cancer is really present. For cancer patients thougs . .it is the only tool available. An exploratory surgery is the only real way to know how much cancer is present. Cancer patients are generally on a three month regular schedule to measure the progress of disease. Anything sooner than three months and it is difficult to tell if the cancer has changed significantly. Waiting any longer than three months and it is hard to catch up with cancer than does grow. What you seem to be suggesting is being a healthy person if you could have regularly scheuled CT, PET, MRI in order to catch cancer early. Well . . it's not a good way to find cancer, because of the limitations of not being able to detect it while it is still small. Cancer has to be fairly large before it can be adequately seen and by than the cancer may already be at a later stage.
4. Unless you are having problems my oncologist recommends bone scans and mri's and ct scans every 3 months. If there are suspicious spots from original scans, pet scans are not done. I was diagnosed with breast cancer and all the scans were done. Now after treatment I only have chest ct scans and bone scans. This is to make sure there are no more spots appearing. I guess it actually depends on the person and what problems they are having. The are no 2 people alike.