Exercise Can Lower Risk of Some Cancers By 20%

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You know the virtues of regular physical activity: it can lower your risk of becoming overweight and can keep diseases like heart problems and diabetes at bay. But can it help reduce the risk of cancer, too? A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine sheds new light on that question.

Previous studies have found that people who are more active tend to have lower rates of colon, breast and endometrial cancer. Exercise might lower colon tumors by speeding the transit of waste through the intestines, leaving little time for any potential cancer-causing agents to harm intestinal tissues. And physical activity can lower estrogen levels, which are known to contribute to breast and endometrial tumors. Still, there was plenty scientists didn’t fully understand about the mechanism, if there is one, by which exercise cuts down on cancer risk.

In an effort to get a more complete picture of how exercise and cancer interact, a team led by Steven Moore, a cancer epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute, took on the ambitious task of pooling data from 1. 4 million people who reported on their physical activity levels over a period of 11 years. Moore matched these peoples’ exercise records with whether they developed 26 different types of cancer.

RELATED: Here’s the Amount of Exercise That Lowers Breast Cancer Risk

The data came from 12 different studies that looked at a wide range of the U.S. and European populations. Overall, people who exercising more saw a 7% lower risk of developing any type of cancer than people who exercised less. But the reduced risk was especially striking for 13 types of cancers. People who were more active had on average a 20% lower risk of cancers of the esophagus, lung, kidney, stomach, endometrium and others compared with people who were less active. The reduction was slightly lower for colon, bladder, and breast cancers.

“Everybody knows physical activity reduces heart disease risk,” says Moore. “The takeaway here is that physical activity might reduce the risk of cancers as well. Cancer is a very feared disease, but if people understand that physical activity can influence their risk for cancer, then that might provide yet one more motivating factor to become active.”

RELATED: What If Your Immune System Could Be Taught to Kill Cancer?

Moore says that the relationship between physical activity and power cancer risk remained strong even after adjusting for other potential factors that could account for the reduction, including things like body mass index (BMI), diet and whether or not they smoked. While the reason for exercise’s benefit in lowering risk of these cancers isn’t clear, it’s possible that physical activity can shift insulin and inflammation to more beneficial levels that don’t promote tumor formation.

Two types of cancers, melanoma and prostate cancer, were higher among those who were more active. The skin cancer risk could be because people who exercise more may spend more time outdoors. The prostate cancer connection may be more complicated. Men who are more active may also pay more attention to their health overall, and therefore get screened more regularly for prostate cancer. (Many prostate cancers are not aggressive and do not require treatment.)

MORE: A Major Shift in Breast Cancer Understanding

Moore adds the caveat that while the data are striking, and the sheer number of people involved gives the results some validity, the association still needs to be confirmed with more studies. For one, the people self-reported on their physical activity, and while the researchers asked them to include only moderate to vigorous exercise, there could still be some bias in how the people recorded their exercise levels. And while they accounted for major factors that could influence cancer outcomes, they might not have included all potential confounders. Even adjusting for BMI, for example, was tricky, since exercise can affect BMI since it affects weight, and people who are heavier tend to be less active.

RELATED: What Teen Girls Should Eat to Reduce Breast Cancer Risk

Still, he says, the study is the most comprehensive look so far at how physical activity can influence cancer risk, and offers another potential way for people to lower their risk of the disease.

This article originally appeared on Time.com.

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Could Inducing Brief, Mild ‘Fever’ Help Ease Depression?

MONDAY, May 16, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Temporarily raising the body temperature of people who are depressed seems to ease symptoms for up to six weeks, a small new study finds.

The treatment, known as whole-body hyperthermia, essentially gives patients a mild, transient fever, the researchers explained.

Similar to some antidepressant drugs, the treatment is thought to work by activating a part of the brain that produces the chemical serotonin. This brain region is less active in people with depression, the researchers explained.

“Our hope is to find better and faster-acting treatments for depression than the antidepressants currently in use,” said lead researcher Dr. Charles Raison of the University of Wisconsin.

“We think that using heat to stimulate the skin activates serotonin-producing cells in the mid-brain, which then produce a change in how the brain functions,” he explained in a university news release. “In a way, one might think of this pathway from the skin to the brain as a deep-brain stimulator crafted by evolution. We tap into this pathway because heat makes the brain feel happy.”

There could be another reason for the effect, said study co-author Christopher Lowry. He pointed out that depression is associated with ruminating, and heating the body might force people to shift their mental focus from their own negative thoughts to the world around them. Lowry is associate professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

One expert who reviewed the findings said the approach was “innovative.”

“This study is refreshing in its attempt to approach treatment of major depressive disorder in a unique and perhaps more palatable way than the traditional pharmacological one,” said Dr. Devon Addonizio, a psychiatrist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

But he pointed out some limitations with the study.

“The very small sample size [29 patients] calls into question how much confidence one can have in the results,” he said. “Larger scale studies would be needed to see if these findings can be replicated.”

Also, people who got the treatment “had significantly higher expectations of successful treatment to begin with,” perhaps skewing the results, Addonizio said.

In the study, the researchers evaluated more than 300 possible volunteers for depression, using a standard scoring system.

They found 34 patients with moderate to severe depression. Five of the volunteers dropped out, leaving a total of 29 patients in the study.

The researchers then used a tent-like, whole-body hyperthermia device to raise the body temperatures of 15 of the patients to about 101.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

The patients got inside the tent-like device. Infrared lights and heating coils heated their chest and legs. Once their body temperature increased, the heat was turned off and the patients cooled down for one hour.

The remaining 14 participants were randomly assigned to a “sham” procedure. These patients were told to lie down inside the hyperthermia device with fans and lights on but they were exposed to much less heat than those who received the actual treatment.

Neither the researchers nor the patients knew if they received the real treatment or the sham therapy.

“Our sham intervention was so realistic that most of the participants (10 of 14) thought they were receiving the real treatment,” Raison noted.

One week after treatment, the researchers re-evaluated each participant’s depression symptoms, based on the same scoring method. Additional evaluations were conducted every two weeks for six weeks.

The researchers found that 60 percent of the patients responded to treatment and 40 percent met the criteria for remission from their depression.

The real hyperthermia therapy improved depression scores a week later by an average of almost 5.7 points above that produced by the sham treatment, the study found. At six weeks after treatment, the real treatment had still improved depression scores by about of 4.8 points.

“We were surprised to see that the effect (of reduced depression symptoms) was still present six weeks after the initial treatment,” Raison said.

Self-reports from the volunteers also showed their symptoms of depression had eased slightly. The participants reported only minor adverse effects from the treatment.

The study authors said their results are encouraging, but larger studies are needed to determine exactly what temperature is most beneficial for patients and precisely how long people should be exposed to the heat.

The findings were presented recently at the annual meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry in Atlanta. The study was also published online May 12 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health provides more information on depression.

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Exercise May Cut Risk of 13 Cancers, Study Suggests

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, May 16, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Exercise may significantly reduce your risk for many types of cancer, including some of the most lethal forms of the disease, a large review suggests.

Working out for even a couple of hours a week appears to shrink the risk of breast, colon and lung cancer, said researchers who looked at 1.4 million adults.

“Those are three of the four major cancers that affect Americans today,” said Marilie Gammon. She is a professor of epidemiology with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Public Health.

And fitness buffs, take heart — your cancer risk appears to continue to decline as you rack up hours of physical activity, with no apparent upper plateau, said study lead author Steven Moore, an investigator with the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

“The more activity, the more the benefit,” Moore said. “As people did more, their risk continued to lower.”

It should be noted, however, that the study only found an association between exercise and reduced cancer risk; it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

In the study, regular exercise wound up being linked to a reduced risk of 13 cancers in all, the researchers said. The others were leukemia, myeloma and cancers of the esophagus, liver, kidney, stomach, endometrium, rectum, bladder, and head and neck.

Current federal guidelines for exercise — 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity a week, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity — are aimed at heart health but also serve well for cancer prevention, Moore said.

Moderate-intensity exercise involves pursuits such as brisk walking or tennis, while vigorous intensity exercise involves heart-pumping activities such as jogging or swimming laps, according to the U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

For this study, Moore and his colleagues focused on leisure-time physical activity performed outside work or household chores. “This is voluntary physical activity typically done to improve health,” he said.

About half of all American adults don’t meet the federal minimum recommendation for exercise, the study authors said in background information.

Prior research has linked exercise to reduced risk of breast and colon cancer, but no study has attempted to look at the effect of physical activity on many different types of cancer, Moore said.

The researchers pooled data from 12 U.S. and European studies to create a database of 1.4 million adults, aged 19 to 98. They then examined whether self-reported physical activity made a difference in risk of 26 cancers.

Exercise was associated with a reduced risk for half of the cancers considered by the investigators, and that reduction remained significant for nearly all, even after accounting for factors such as obesity and smoking history.

Overall, a higher level of physical activity was associated with a 7 percent lower risk of total cancer, the researchers reported.

The range of reduced risk ran from 42 percent for esophageal cancer to 10 percent for breast cancer, the study authors said. For colon and lung cancer, risk was lowered 16 percent and 26 percent, respectively, the findings suggested.

“This suggests that physical activity may have a role to play in population-wide cancer prevention efforts,” Moore said.

The findings were published online May 16 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

No one is certain why exercise seems to help fend off cancer, Moore and Gammon said, but there are some leading theories.

Physical activity reduces levels of hormones, such as estrogen, that have been linked to different cancers, and helps control levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor, Moore said.

People who work out also tend to have lower levels of inflammation, Moore said. Their cells appear to be subject to less oxidative stress, and are more capable of repairing damaged DNA that might cause cancer, said Gammon, co-author of an editorial accompanying the study.

Gammon said she was most pleased with the 42 percent risk reduction found in esophageal cancer.

“That’s pretty amazing, because it’s a very deadly tumor,” she said. “I think the average length of survival is 11 to 12 months after you’re diagnosed.”

Other very deadly cancers that appear to become less common with exercise include those of the liver, stomach, kidney, and head and neck, Gammon said.

“Having a strategy to help reduce risk of those cancers is very good, because your outlook is not optimal once you’re diagnosed,” she said.

More information

For more on exercise and cancer, visit the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

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More Bars, More Ambulance Calls

MONDAY, May 16, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Areas with more bars have about eight times more ambulance calls than places where booze flows less freely, according to a new study.

Dr. Joel Ray, a physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, examined trends in EMS calls and the density of alcohol-serving establishments in certain areas near the city.

Neighborhoods with the most establishments licensed to sell alcohol have a 7.8 times higher risk for 911 calls related to trauma compared to areas with the fewest of these places, the study found.

EMS calls for trauma ranged from 45.3 per 1,000 calls in areas with no on-premise places licensed to sell alcohol to 381 per 1,000 calls in areas with the highest density of these places, the study showed.

Trauma risk was particularly high among young men who frequent bars, night clubs, pool halls and similar spots focused on serving drinks, Ray said.

The study also showed that EMS calls in response to assaults near bars or restaurants peak around last call, or 2 a.m.

Ray also noted that EMS calls nearly triple at the end of the month when many people get paid, suggesting alcohol consumption is related to how much money people have, not just the cost.

“We reiterate that public policies that raise prices of alcohol are an effective means to reduce drinking,” Ray said in a hospital news release. “Given the province of Ontario’s actions to liberally increasing access to alcohol, such as through grocery stores, it is imperative that pricing remains high.”

The study’s findings likely apply to areas other than Ontario, Ray said. He said local governments should consider limiting the number of liquor licenses in areas that already have lots of bars, or in areas with a very high number of emergency calls for public drunkenness, assault or other trauma.

He also suggested that EMS personnel should have a checklist to help determine if people should be taken directly to a detoxification center.

“It is time to take a more active stance about a substance that is legal, widely available yet harmful,” Ray said.

The study finding were published May 13 in the journal Medicine.

More information

The U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism discusses how alcohol affects the body.

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Devout Women May Enjoy Better Health

By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, May 16, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Routinely attending religious services may confer a halo of better health around American women, a new study suggests.

Harvard researchers found that women who went to religious services at least twice a week were one-third less likely to die over the 20-year study period, compared to women who never attended services.

Is this a case of divine intervention, or is there another reason behind the improved longevity?

“The association between religious participation and mortality probably has more to do with religious practice and specifically, communal practice, like attending religious services, than with religious belief,” said study author Tyler VanderWeele.

“Something about the communal religious experience seems to be powerful for health,” said VanderWeele, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

VanderWeele said previous research has found that personal religious or spiritual identity, or private religious practices, don’t seem to matter as much for health.

“These things may of course still be important and meaningful within the context of religious life, but they do not appear to affect health as strongly. The results from our study suggest that there may be something important about religious service attendance beyond solitary spirituality,” he said.

Does that mean that folks who don’t attend regularly attend religious services are doomed to a shorter life span? Not necessarily. VanderWeele pointed out that “with data of this sort one generally cannot definitively demonstrate a cause-effect relationship.”

He added that the association doesn’t seem to be as strong for men as it is for women.

Nevertheless, VanderWeele said research does seem to indicate that women who regularly attend religious services appear to benefit from a boost in social support and a heightened sense of self-discipline, along with a diminished risk for both smoking and depression.

“[So] at least for those already religious, service attendance may be a powerful and underappreciated health resource,” VanderWeele added.

The study was published in the May 16 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say that religion is an important part of their lives. Eighty-three percent said they’ve prayed to God during the past week. More than four in 10 Americans said they attended a religious service in the past week, the researchers noted.

The study included information from almost 75,000 U.S. women in the Nurses’ Health Study. The original study began in 1976. The women were between 30 and 55 years old at that time. Information on lifestyle, health and religious practice was collected between 1992 and 2012.

During the 20-year study period, more than 13,500 women died.

The researchers adjusted the data to account for a number of factors. These included: diet, physical activity routines, drinking and smoking history, weight, depression, social life and race.

Women who went to a service at least once a week had a 27 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease. They also had a 21 percent lower risk of dying from cancer compared to those who didn’t attend service at all, the study found.

Compared with non-attendees, once-weekly service goers saw their risk for dying drop by 26 percent, while those who went less frequently saw their risk drop by 13 percent, the study noted.

Women who regularly attended religious services had fewer depressive symptoms. They were also less likely to be smokers. And women who attended services more than once a week were more likely to be married, the study found.

Women who went to religious services more than once a week also lived an average of five months longer than women who never went to services, the researchers said.

The study authors cautioned that because most of the women in the study were white and Christian (Catholic or Protestant), the findings may not apply to all American women.

Dr. Dan German Blazer II, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said that “despite the findings, we cannot for certain say that religious belief/practice per se is the actual cause [of longevity].” Blazer is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical Center.

He stressed the need for more research. But he also described the current investigation as “a major contribution” that “provides significantly more reason to believe that there is something about religious belief [and] practice among these women which contributes to protection against dying.”

More information

Read about spirituality and cancer care at the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

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Kesha Just Shut Down Body-Shamers in an Epic Way

Photo: Getty Images

Kesha is not having any of the Internet’s body-shaming. And she made it pretty clear how she feels about people who criticize her body in her latest Instagram post.

The singer revealed on the social media channel that she has been battling depression and an eating disorder for a while now, but she is finally getting her life back on track. “My career is in a strange place and it feels like I’m fighting an uphill fight some days. but I have decided to take my life back. my freedom. my happiness. my voice. my worth,” Kesha wrote. Get it, trolls? The singer has no time for your bullying.

RELATED: FYI: Kesha Looks Amazing in Her New Video

This article originally appeared on InStyle.com/MIMI.

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Parents Often Don’t Get Rid of Leftover Prescription Opioids

MONDAY, May 16, 2016 (HealthDay News) — When children are prescribed opioid painkillers, such as Oxycontin or Percocet, for surgery or illness, about half of parents say they keep the leftover medicine on hand.

“We found that the amount of pain medication prescribed for children is frequently greater than the amount used, and too few parents recall clear direction from their provider about what to do with leftover medication,” said Sarah Clark, co-director of the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health.

“This is a missed opportunity to prevent prescription drug misuse among children,” Clark added in a statement from the University of Michigan Health System. “Many parents simply keep extra pain pills in their home. Those leftover pills represent easy access to narcotics for teens and their friends.”

According to the poll results, about a third of parents said their kids had received pain medication prescriptions, mostly for narcotic drugs such as oxycodone (Oxycontin, Percocet) or hydrocodone.

Only 8 percent of parents reported returning the leftover medication to a pharmacy or doctor; 30 percent disposed of the medication in the trash or toilet. Six percent said other family members used the medication, and 9 percent couldn’t recall where the medications went.

Only one-third of parents said their child’s doctor had discussed what to do with leftover medicine. When providers talked to parents about what to do with any excess drugs, only 26 percent still had leftover pills in the home. But, in homes where doctors didn’t give guidance on what to do with the excess pills, 56 percent of parents kept the extra pills at home, the survey found.

“The epidemic of prescription drug abuse affects all sectors of the U.S. population, including children and teens,” Clark said. “For adolescents, a known point of access to narcotic pain medication is leftover pills from a prior prescription. Our poll suggests we need to do a much better job of explaining this risk to parents.”

The survey results are based on a poll of nearly 1,200 parents with at least one child aged 5 to 17.

More information

For more about proper care of opioid painkillers, try the American Academy of Family Physicians.

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When New Moms Work Longer Hours, Breast-Feeding Takes a Back Seat

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, May 16, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Every working mom knows how hard it can be to juggle the demands of her job with the needs of her new baby, particularly when it comes to breast-feeding.

Now, a new study has concluded that the more hours a new mom works, the tougher it is for her to continue breast-feeding.

Mothers working 19 or fewer hours a week were much more likely to maintain breast-feeding through their babies’ sixth month of life, compared to moms who had returned to full-time employment, said lead researcher Ning Xiang.

“Every effort should be made to enable new mothers to spend more time with their newborn to establish and maintain breast-feeding,” said Xiang, a research assistant with the University of Queensland Institute for Social Science Research, in Australia.

“Governments should consider measures to encourage new mothers to delay their return to work, such as paid parental leave. Employers should be encouraged to be lactation-friendly and to provide flexible work arrangements to new mothers,” she added.

Breast milk is incredibly beneficial to the health of newborns, according to the U.S. Office on Women’s Health. The milk contains rich nutrients and antibodies, and babies who are breast-fed are less likely to develop asthma, ear infections, eczema, diarrhea or vomiting, lower respiratory infections, type 2 diabetes and obesity. They’re also less likely to fall prey to childhood leukemia or SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), research has shown.

Any return to work caused some decline in the number of mothers who still breast-fed their babies, according to results Xiang and her colleagues obtained from a survey of 2,300 working mothers in Australia.

But women employed up to 19 hours a week only faced a 10 percent chance that they quit breast-feeding altogether by their baby’s sixth month, the researchers found.

On the other hand, women working between 20 hours and 34 hours a week had a 45 percent chance of stopping, and moms working 35 or more hours had a 60 percent chance that they’d drop breast-feeding.

“Given the time-consuming nature of breast-feeding, mothers need to be physically with their baby to maintain breast-feeding, particularly in the first six months of the baby’s life,” Xiang said. “Working more than 20 hours entails that mothers would have to spend less time with their baby.”

The findings were published online May 16 in the journal Pediatrics.

Breast-feeding is not always simple to start, and new mothers often feel pressured to return to work before they’re ready, said Diana West. She is a board-certified lactation consultant and director of media relations for La Leche League International, a breast-feeding advocacy group.

“Many women are going back to work much sooner than their milk supplies would like them to do,” West said. “Many women have difficulty in the first few weeks and sometimes months, not only just getting breast-feeding off to a good start but getting all the kinks smoothed out. And just when they do, they’ve got to go back to work to keep their health insurance and pay their bills.”

The study findings suggest that businesses should provide assistance to new mothers by offering work schedules that help keep them home with their baby, said Kate Dupont Phillips. She is a population health specialist at Nemours Health & Prevention Services, a Delaware-based child health and wellness research program.

“This study demonstrates there’s a lot of flexibility to be had, and there’s no one right way to support moms,” she said.

Allowing new mothers to work part-time is an option that’s been mulled over, and this study shows it’s a good idea, Phillips said. Work programs like job-sharing, telecommuting or flex time also can help moms minimize the amount of time they’re away from their baby.

Paid extended maternity leave is the best and most basic option, West said, and many companies are beginning to recognize the value of giving women time to devote all their attention to their new babies.

Paid leave has been shown to reduce health care expenses associated with sick babies, which in turn lowers the cost of health insurance for employers, she said.

By offering paid leave or flexible working schedules, employers also avoid having to replace moms forced to choose their baby’s health over their job, West added.

“When we have happy employees, then the companies don’t have to replace that position and retrain and rehire,” she said.

Businesses also can support new moms by providing a clean, sanitary private room for breast milk pumping “that is not a bathroom or a dismal closet,” West said.

More information

For more on business support of breast-feeding, visit the U.S. Office on Women’s Health.

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COPD Discovery Might Improve Treatment

SUNDAY, May 15 2016 (HealthDay News) — Researchers say they’ve found a new way to predict how chronic obstructive pulmonary disease will progress, a discovery they believe could improve COPD treatment.

Their research might help doctors determine which patients are less likely to respond to standard treatment and are at higher risk for disease advancement, the study authors explained.

COPD — chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — is a chronic lung disease that makes it tough to breathe. It includes chronic bronchitis and emphysema, according to the American Lung Association.

The new discovery concerns something called neutrophilic airway inflammation, which is associated with COPD. Neutrophils are white blood cells that are important for fighting infection.

Scientists said that a type of neutrophil behavior called neutrophil extracellular trap (NET) formation in the lungs of COPD patients appears to reduce their ability to destroy bacteria.

“We have known for many years that neutrophils should be able to fight infection, but we haven’t fully understood why they don’t work in COPD,” said study author Dr. James Chalmers, from the University of Dundee in Scotland.

“Some recent studies described the presence of NETs in the COPD lung, so we wanted to know whether there was any relationship between NETs and outcomes in COPD patients,” he said in a news release from the American Thoracic Society.

For the study, the researchers collected blood and sputum samples from 141 patients at the end of acute COPD flare-ups.

The researchers found the amount of NET formations in participants’ lungs was directly related to the severity of their lung disease and their risk for COPD flare-ups that didn’t respond to treatment with corticosteroids.

NETs result in more infections as well as worse lung function and quality of life, the study authors concluded.

“This marker may help us identify patients at higher risk of disease progression,” said Chalmers. “And it identifies a subset of patients who may need treatments other than corticosteroids. Our data show that inhaled steroids may even exacerbate NETs, so we need to identify new COPD treatments and discover whether inhibiting NET formation will result in improved clinical outcomes for patients with COPD.”

The researchers plan to continue their investigation, examining why NET formation occurs and whether it can be prevented or treated.

“While our new research is at an early stage, we hope that detecting NETs may be a biomarker that can identify patients at risk of deterioration, and that we can work toward testing whether inhibiting NET formation would be a beneficial treatment in COPD,” Chalmers said.

The findings were to be presented Sunday at the American Thoracic Society’s annual meeting, in San Francisco. Research presented at meetings usually is regarded as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

More information

The American Lung Association provides more information on COPD.

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Out-of-Pocket X-Ray, CT Scan Costs Vary Widely

By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter

SUNDAY, May 15, 2016 (HealthDay News) — The out-of-pocket price for a standard chest X-ray, CT scan or ultrasound can vary by hundreds of dollars, depending on where the imaging is done, new research reveals.

And uninsured patients trying to get the cost in advance may face an uphill battle, investigators caution, with hospitals slower to respond than stand-alone imaging centers.

How slow? Calls made to six hospitals and five private imaging centers in the Philadelphia region got answers from half of the hospitals within five to 10 minutes, researchers said. But one-third of the hospitals took between 10 and 15 minutes, while the rest took even longer.

While none of the independent imaging centers took longer than 10 minutes to provide radiology cost information (and calls were never transferred), nearly 10 percent of the hospitals ignored two patient inquiries made over the course of three days, the findings showed.

“The lack of price transparency is certainly not isolated to the field of radiology alone,” said study co-author Dr. Mindy Licurse, a diagnostic radiology resident with the University of Pennsylvania Health System. For example, a 2014 analysis by the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute in Connecticut and Catalyst for Payment Reform in California revealed that most states lack laws making health cost information available to consumers.

“Our study certainly contributes to the underlying hypothesis that pricing information within health care, specifically imaging in this case, may be difficult to obtain depending on the setting, and therefore comparison-shopping by patients is limited,” she added.

Licurse and study co-author Dr. William Boonn were scheduled to present their findings Sunday in Washington, D.C., at a meeting of the American College of Radiology (ACR). Research presented at meetings is usually considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

The researchers focused on three commonly ordered exams: so-called two-view chest X-rays; CT scans of the abdomen/pelvis with contrast; and pelvic ultrasounds.

Across hospitals and imaging centers in three states, X-ray costs varied from a low of $41 to a high of $285. CT scan costs ranged from $437 to $2,239, while ultrasounds went from $150 to $592, the study revealed.

Hospital pricing, when provided, was consistently higher for all procedures, the study found. For example, the average hospital price for an X-ray was $140, compared with $76 at an imaging center. Similarly, average CT scan and ultrasound prices were $1,146 and $442, respectively, at hospitals, compared with $586 and $263, respectively, at independent facilities.

Licurse said the solution to the pricing transparency problem “is unlikely [to be] straightforward.”

“Combating health care costs has, of course, been a growing focus amongst policymakers as well as consumers,” she said. But, “price transparency is most likely only a small piece of the solution, of which the impact is debatable.”

Still, Licurse said, price transparency could contribute to containment of health costs “by improving cost awareness among both physicians as well as patient consumers, possibly leading to lowering of prices for the sake of remaining competitive.”

Other schools of thought have warned that consumer-shopping may, however, lead to decreased quality of exams to account for lower pricing, she added. The trick is finding “the appropriate balance,” Licurse suggested.

That concern was seconded by Dr. Geraldine McGinty, a radiologist with Weill Cornell Imaging at New York-Presbyterian in New York City. She is also chair of the American College of Radiology’s economics commission.

“Price transparency is a laudable goal,” she said. “But, it’s important that our patients have tools to help them understand potential differences in quality.”

McGinty suggested that the ACR’s own accreditation programs are one good resource for radiology pricing and quality information.

“We should, however, not make our patients jump through hoops and have to make multiple calls to get an answer,” she added. “Patient-centered care should involve prompt responses to questions, not just about billing.

“Part of making our patients feel secure about the care they will receive from us includes being able to answer questions about billing in an efficient and open way,” she said.

More information

There’s more on health care costs and transparency at Fair Health.

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