Table of Contents
A booming industry is selling full-body MRI scans directly to the public — no doctor referral required. Celebrities are endorsing them. Companies have raised hundreds of millions in funding. And the pitch is compelling: catch cancer before it's too late. But the American College of Radiology explicitly advises against routine full-body MRI screening [1], and the evidence tells a much more complicated story than the marketing suggests.
The Promise
If catching cancer early means it is easily treatable, then a full-body scan sounds like an obvious win. One quick scan, no radiation, and a head-to-toe check for early signs of disease.
The logic seems airtight.
One company leading the charge is Prenuvo. They charge $2,500 per scan, and they have raised over $120 million in funding [2]. Celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Gwyneth Paltrow have publicly promoted them [3].
Kardashian called hers a "life-saving machine" in an Instagram post that received 3.4 million likes. The CEO later confirmed those celebrities were offered complimentary scans and invited to give an honest review if they wished [4].
The experience is designed to feel more like a luxury spa than a medical facility — patients can watch their favourite show during the scan [5].
The market for scan providers is booming. Radiology practice SimonMed is doubling the number of centres offering full-body MRI scans amid what they describe as "exponential" demand growth [6].
The Controversy
But this trend has provoked a major controversy within the radiology profession.
One radiologist at Penn Medicine, Saurabh Jha, put it bluntly: "If I put my physician cap on, then I realize that this is all just humbug, bordering on quackery" [3].
That might sound surprising. Why wouldn't more information about health always be a positive thing?
Something that happened in South Korea illustrates how things can go badly wrong. The country faced an alarming trend around the year 2000. The number of people diagnosed with thyroid cancer exploded. In 1999, there were 6.3 cases per 100,000 people. By 2009, that number had ballooned to nearly 48 — more than seven times as many [7].
What was going on that was suddenly causing so much thyroid cancer?
The answer isn't what you might expect. After a careful examination of the data, researchers figured out what was driving the surge. It didn't look like more people were getting thyroid cancer. Instead, doctors were just finding more cases that had been there all along — because a government-funded cancer screening initiative had led to the widespread use of ultrasound to screen for thyroid cancer [7].
At that point, the story takes an interesting twist. Catching all these cancers early would be expected to produce much better outcomes in terms of death rates. But it didn't. Mortality rates in South Korea for thyroid cancer remained about the same [7].
In other words, despite aggressive screening that let doctors catch many cases they used to miss, there were no better health outcomes related to thyroid cancer in South Korea.
By 2012, around 11,000 patients had surgery for thyroid cancer — up from only about 1,000 in 2001. But that had no noticeable impact on mortality [8]. These surgeries weren't saving lives. Most of them were totally unnecessary.
What probably happened was that many of these cancers were so slow-growing they were never going to cause an issue during a person's lifetime. Autopsy studies routinely find these tiny thyroid tumours in around 11% of people who die of completely unrelated causes [9].
And the surgeries weren't without consequence: 11% of those operated on developed hypoparathyroidism, 2% suffered vocal cord paralysis, and most survivors required lifelong thyroid replacement therapy [10]. Research from around the time when surgeries were increasing found that about 1 out of every 1,000 patients undergoing thyroid surgery dies from the procedure itself [11].
Then there's what happened in the UK. A massive trial of over 200,000 women tested the impact of screening for ovarian and tubal cancers using blood tests and ultrasounds. Death rates remained the same between the screened group and the unscreened group. And there was a significant number of unnecessary surgeries — about 50 women underwent unnecessary surgery per 10,000 screens [12].
Overdiagnosis researcher H. Gilbert Welch put it simply: "The side effect of looking for early forms of disease is that we find, virtually, all of us have some" [13].
When it comes specifically to full-body MRI scans that aren't ordered by a doctor in response to symptoms, critics have raised two key concerns.
First, there is a high rate of finding things that don't look normal — known as "incidental findings." One study of whole-body MRIs discovered that in about 36% of cases there was an incidental finding [14]. But the concern is that it often isn't clear whether that finding is anything to worry about. In the study, 36% of findings were classified as benign, but nearly 60% of the time it was unclear whether they were benign or not [14].
Those unclear incidental findings can cause significant worry, and they can trigger follow-up biopsies and surgeries that will often turn out to be totally unnecessary.
And it's not just about finding things that don't matter. A 35-year-old man named Sean Clifford paid for a Prenuvo scan. His report described his brain's blood vessels as "normal." Eight months later, he had a catastrophic stroke. Attorneys contend the radiologist missed significant narrowing in a major brain artery [15]. Clifford now suffers from partial paralysis, impaired vision, and chronic headaches [16]. The scan didn't just fail to help — it provided false reassurance.
So that's the first concern: incidental findings that probably would never have caused an issue, but whose discovery leads to unnecessary stress and medical procedures — and an inability to rely on a clear outcome even when a scan comes back normal.
The second concern is that there is very little data on what the actual benefits might be. There is currently no evidence that whole-body MRI scans in people without symptoms actually extend lifespan. The South Korea and UK cases show that it is entirely possible to find more cancer and perform more operations, and yet not end up with any better health outcomes.
These are the two concerns highlighted by the American College of Radiology's statement on full-body MRIs as a screening tool. The ACR does not recommend them: there is a high risk of unnecessary care and a lack of data showing benefit [1].
What the Evidence Shows
The most extensive review of the literature on full-body MRIs was recently published. It included 10 studies and just over 9,000 participants [17]. The analysis reinforced those two important points — rates of incidental findings were high, and there is no good data on cost-effectiveness [17].
But the review added another data point that provides crucial context. The researchers found that these scans detect confirmed cancer 1.57% of the time [17]. The authors called it a "modest detection rate." But critics pushed back: breast cancer screening detects cancer in around 0.5% of screens, and lung cancer screening among high-risk smokers detects around 0.8–1.1%. By that comparison, 1.57% is comparable or better [18].
Proponents also argue that a significant advantage of whole-body MRI scans is the ability to detect a range of cancers — including pancreatic, ovarian, and kidney cancers — for which there is currently no established population-level screening approach [18].
Despite this pushback, both sides agree on one thing: more data is needed to determine whether these preventative scans are actually cost-effective and useful in normal clinical settings [18]. And this is why, even in light of this up-to-date data, the position of the American College of Radiology continues to make sense.
There is an important distinction between what an expert body recommends for the general population and what might make sense for an individual patient. Medical guidelines are designed as population-level guidance, not absolute rules for every individual. A clinician and a patient might weigh the risks of incidental findings differently depending on the individual's circumstances, risk tolerance, and ability to process an uncertain result calmly.
That said, for the vast majority of people, the balance of evidence currently favours against routine full-body MRI screening. The potential costs — unnecessary procedures, false reassurance, significant expense, and the anxiety of uncertain incidental findings — are relatively clear. The benefits remain unproven in terms of actual mortality reduction. This is why the American College of Radiology's position against routine full-body MRI screening remains well-founded even after the most recent systematic review.
For most people, following the established evidence-based screening programmes remains the best-supported approach. This includes bowel cancer screening, breast cancer screening, cervical screening, and lung cancer screening for high-risk smokers. These programmes have demonstrated reductions in mortality in large randomised trials — something whole-body MRI screening has not yet shown. Sticking to these evidence-backed programmes, and discussing any additional screening decisions with a qualified clinician who can weigh individual circumstances, is the approach most consistent with the current evidence.
References
3. https://www.statnews.com/2023/08/11/kim-kardashian-full-body-mri-scans/
4. https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2023/09/29/full-body-mri
5. https://prenuvo.com/clinic-experience
7. https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5745
8. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc1507622
9. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9516102/
10. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMp1409841
11. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11926912/
12. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37183782/
13. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/133686016
14. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22911290/
15. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/01/13/prenuvo-lawsuit-full-body-scan/
17. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00330-025-11976-5
18. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00330-025-12192-x
