CHECKUP : NEWS, TIPS AND TRENDS COST SAVINGS MINIMAL IN TERMINAL PATIENTS' CHOICE TO DIE.

Byline: - Daily News Staff and Wire Services

It may save you some suffering, but any savings in health-care costs from allowing terminally ill patients to end their lives would be minimal. So say Ezekiel Emanuel of Harvard Medical School in Boston and Margaret Battin of the University of Utah School of Medicine. Despite the argument that legalizing physician-assisted suicide would save a lot of money, their study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that no more than $627 million - less than .07 percent of the annual total spent on U.S. health care - would be saved.

Screening for cystic fibrosis: Experts at the sixth Scarborough Conference in Preventive Medicine in Maine this week agreed that testing for prenatal cystic fibrosis (CF) is reliable enough to warrant screening the population at large. One in 2,500 children of European heritage is born with CF, a genetic disease that is usually fatal by age 30, but the disease is rare in people of other ethnic backgrounds.

The power of suggestion: Any benefits from the newest anti-depressant drugs may be all in your head. Researchers who analyzed 19 studies of anti-depressants, including Prozac-type drugs, found the psychological boost from taking a pill, rather than changes in brain chemistry, could account for the improvements in patients, New Scientist magazine reports. Unlike pharmaceutical companies, which say the drugs are 40 percent more effective than chemically inactive placebos, the researchers found the drugs were only 25 percent better than the dummy pills.

Test for ulcers: Blood tests may help confirm whether a person is rid of the bacterium that causes most ulcers, researchers have found.

People with peptic ulcers are now routinely given antibiotics that attack an organism called Helicobacter pylori. But to verify that a patient is cured, doctors rely on tests that can be time consuming and expensive.

Seeking an easier method, doctors from the VA North Texas Health Care System and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas evaluated blood tests. While earlier studies have examined the role of blood tests for monitoring ulcer treatment, their value has remained unclear.

The Dallas study involved 23 volunteers, all of whom were tested one month, three months and 18 months after treatment. Biopsies confirmed that 15 of them were healthy after 18 months.

Reporting in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the researchers said that 60 percent of the healthy patients saw their blood tests shift from positive to negative. None of the eight patients who weren't cured experienced a similar conversion. That means, the doctors said, that changes in the blood test could signal successful treatment.