General health checks in adults for reducing morbidity and mortality from disease.

General health checks are common elements of health care in some countries. They aim to detect disease and risk factors for disease with the purpose of reducing morbidity and mortality. Most of the commonly used individual screening tests offered in general health checks have been incompletely studied. Also, screening leads to increased use of diagnostic and therapeutic interventions, which can be harmful as well as beneficial. It is therefore important to assess whether general health checks do more good than harm. This is the first update of the review published in 2012.