--- title: What the premium checkup package reliably buys is radiation. Price and dose correlate at 0.812 publication: Medical Insights Korea section: news category: Screening canonical_url: https://medicalinsightskorea.com/news/korea-premium-checkup-radiation-dose-correlates-with-price author: James Choi published: 2026-09-13T15:00:00+09:00 modified: 2026-09-13T15:00:00+09:00 content_type: reporting license: Quotation permitted with attribution to Medical Insights Korea and a link to the canonical URL. --- # What the premium checkup package reliably buys is radiation. Price and dose correlate at 0.812 An analysis of 190 comprehensive programmes at ten Seoul university hospitals found the overnight package averaging 24.08 mSv — for people with no symptoms. Two programmes with the same stated purpose differed by 2.1 times. ## Answer In an analysis of 190 comprehensive health examination programmes advertised by ten university hospitals in Seoul, 132 programmes (69.5 percent) included computed tomography and the average effective radiation dose was 3.62 mSv for an intensive disease-specific programme, 11.12 mSv for an intensive cancer programme, 18.14 mSv for a premium programme and 24.08 mSv for an overnight programme — between 3.6 and 24 times the annual dose limit for a member of the public — with programme cost correlating with effective dose at r = 0.812. ## Key takeaways - Among 190 comprehensive health examination programmes at ten Seoul university hospitals, 132 (69.5 percent) included computed tomography, averaging 1.4 scans. - Average effective dose was 3.62 mSv for an intensive programme for specific diseases, 11.12 mSv for an intensive cancer programme, 18.14 mSv for a premium programme and 24.08 mSv for an overnight programme. - Those doses are between 3.6 and 24 times the annual dose limit for a member of the general public, delivered to asymptomatic people. - Programme cost correlated with effective dose at r = 0.812, and the inclusion of PET-CT was the single most critical factor determining a programme's dose band. - Programmes with the same stated purpose differed in effective dose by as much as 2.1 times depending on which hospital offered them. - A 2025 risk model projected that the roughly 93 million CT examinations performed in the United States in 2023 would produce about 103,000 radiation-induced cancers over the lifetimes of those patients. - That model projected CT-associated cancer could eventually account for 5 percent of all new cancer diagnoses annually if current practice persists. ## Full article Korean comprehensive checkup packages are sold in tiers. The tiers have names — intensive, premium, overnight — and prices that rise with them. What has not generally been published is what the extra money buys, measured in the one unit that can be compared across hospitals. ### What was measured A study in Environmental Health and Toxicology took the comprehensive examination programmes advertised on the websites of ten university hospitals in Seoul — 190 programmes in total — and had radiologists review the radiation-based studies each one included. Only the effective doses of the basic studies were counted; optional add-ons were excluded, so these figures are floors rather than ceilings. **Average effective dose by programme tier, ten Seoul university hospitals** | Programme tier | Effective dose | Multiple of the annual public dose limit | | --- | --- | --- | | Intensive, specific diseases | 3.62 mSv | ≈3.6× | | Intensive, cancer | 11.12 mSv | ≈11× | | Premium | 18.14 mSv | ≈18× | | Overnight | 24.08 mSv | ≈24× | The annual effective dose limit for a member of the public from artificial sources is 1 mSv. These are single examinations, delivered to people attending because they are well. ### The correlation that names what the tiers are **r = 0.812** — correlation between the cost of a Korean comprehensive checkup programme and its effective radiation dose _Source: Lee YK, Environmental Health and Toxicology, 2016_ A correlation of 0.812 between price and dose is strong enough to say what the tier system substantially is. The single most critical factor determining which band a programme fell into was whether it included positron emission tomography combined with computed tomography. > **What this does not claim** > It does not claim that expensive checkups are worthless, or that any individual scan in them was unwarranted. It claims something narrower and harder to argue with: across 190 programmes, the reliable difference between a cheaper package and a dearer one was the quantity of ionising radiation delivered — and radiation is the component whose harm is best quantified and whose benefit in asymptomatic people is least demonstrated. The variation between hospitals is its own finding. Programmes with the same stated purpose differed in dose by as much as 2.1 times depending on where they were bought. A patient choosing between two hospitals' cancer packages is, without being told, choosing between two very different exposures. ### What a dose figure translates into Millisieverts are an abstraction to almost everybody who receives them. A 2025 risk model published in JAMA Internal Medicine converts the abstraction into cases. Using organ-specific dose distributions from a multicentre CT dose registry, scaled to the approximately 93 million CT examinations performed on 61.5 million patients in the United States in 2023, it projected about 103,000 radiation-induced cancers over those patients' lifetimes, with a 90 percent uncertainty limit of 96,400 to 109,500. - Lung cancer was the commonest projected outcome at 22,400 cases, followed by colon at 8,700, leukaemia at 7,900 and bladder at 7,100. - Abdomen and pelvis CT in adults accounted for 37,500 of the 103,000 projected cancers, from 30 million of the 93 million examinations. - Risk per examination was higher in children and adolescents, but higher use in adults meant adults accounted for 91 percent of the projected cancers. - Across sensitivity analyses the projection ranged from 80,000 to 127,000. The authors concluded that if current practice persists, CT-associated cancer could eventually account for 5 percent of all new cancer diagnoses annually. ### Reading these two studies together, carefully These are separate bodies of evidence and they must not be merged into a Korean casualty figure. The JAMA Internal Medicine projection is of American CT use, and it is a model built on the linear no-threshold assumption — that risk scales with dose all the way down — which is the standard basis for radiation protection and is not a directly measured result at these dose levels. Nobody counted 103,000 cancers. They were projected. What the two studies jointly establish is the shape of the problem rather than its size in Korea. CT delivers a quantifiable dose; the dose carries a modelled risk that regulators treat as real; Korean private checkup packages deliver that dose to asymptomatic people in quantities that rise with price; and no study cited here has measured the outcomes of the Korean population receiving them. That last absence is the finding worth stating plainly. Korea has the national claims infrastructure to link checkup imaging exposure to later cancer incidence, and no published analysis has done it. The dose is documented. The consequence is not. ## Sources - Lee YK. Level of radiation dose in university hospital noninsured private health screening programs in Korea. Environmental Health and Toxicology 2016;31:e2016007. doi:10.5620/eht.e2016007. PMID:27032387. https://doi.org/10.5620/eht.e2016007 - Smith-Bindman R, Chu PW, Azman Firdaus H, Stewart C, Malekhedayat M, Alber S, Bolch WE, Mahendra M, et al. Projected lifetime cancer risks from current computed tomography imaging. JAMA Internal Medicine 2025;185(6):710-719. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.0505. PMID:40227719. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.0505 ## Citation James Choi (2026). "What the premium checkup package reliably buys is radiation. Price and dose correlate at 0.812". Medical Insights Korea. https://medicalinsightskorea.com/news/korea-premium-checkup-radiation-dose-correlates-with-price Retrieved from https://medicalinsightskorea.com/news/korea-premium-checkup-radiation-dose-correlates-with-price