If you live in the United States, you may have seen the ads.
A quick MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) or ultrasound – no symptoms required – and you’ll supposedly get ahead of any disease lurking in your body.
Wellness clinics and celebrity endorsements have turned whole-body imaging into one of the hottest add-ons in preventive health.
What the marketing tends to leave out is what radiologists keep saying out loud.
The evidence for scanning healthy people is thin, and the fine print starts with your credit card.
What it actually finds
A whole-body MRI or ultrasound can pick up benign and cancerous tumours, abnormalities in bone marrow or lymph nodes, and irregularities in major blood vessels.
It can also flag conditions like fatty liver, gallstones and kidney cysts.
Brain problems such as stroke or excess fluid can show up too, along with musculoskeletal issues like disc disease or joint damage.
That is a lot of information from a single appointment, which is part of why the scans have caught on.
Prices in the US generally run from US$1,000 (RM4,080) to US$3,500 (RM14,281) depending on the type of imaging, according to American media company Forbes, and insurance typically doesn’t cover them as they are not clinically warranted.
That’s the piece the social feeds tend to skip.
You’re paying out of pocket, and if you scan annually, you’re paying every time.
Why doctors say no
No major medical group recommends full-body scans for people without specific risk factors.
That list includes the American Cancer Society and the American College of Radiology (ACR).
In a 2023 statement, the ACR said there is no “sufficient evidence to justify recommending total body screening for patients with no clinical symptoms, risk factors or a family history suggesting underlying disease or serious injury”.
In plainer terms, without symptoms or a specific reason to worry, screening a healthy body head to toe isn’t something the evidence supports.
Here is the number that punctures the marketing.
Research suggests about 95% of people who undergo a full-body MRI will have at least one abnormal finding.
More than 90% of those findings are harmless cysts, nodules or other changes that do not affect overall health.
Roughly 15% to 30% of all diagnostic imaging in adult patients contains at least one incidental finding, according to University of Michigan radiologist Dr Matthew Davenport.
Incidental findings are small abnormalities that are doing no harm and would not have been discovered without a scan.
“Incidental findings happen in any type of MRI or CT [computed tomography] scan – typically while conducting a scan to find something else.
“New whole-body MRI scans are scans that seek out incidental findings, which make the results seem more alarming than they are,” he said.
Unnecessary cost
That cascade has costs.
Patients who receive incidental findings face an increased risk of overtreatment, and screening is more likely to flag indolent (slow-growing or static) disease than aggressive types.
Treating indolent disease can do more harm than good.
“Most incidental findings don’t need to be treated, and aren’t serious.
“However, attempting to maximally diagnose [patients] causes significant costs and time, results in additional testing and procedures, and their related complications, and can result in emotional and physical harm,” Dr Davenport said.
The mental toll is part of the equation too.
“It makes healthy people think of themselves as patients,” he said.
American concierge medicine physician Dr Erine Erickson told Cleveland Clinic that context from a doctor who already knows the patient is what keeps a spooky-looking image from spiralling into something worse.
“That means many people go through extra testing, anxiety, and sometimes, even biopsies for results that turn out to be harmless.
“This is where having a physician who knows your health history can help put those findings into context,” she said.
American neuroradiologist Dr Sarah Stock told Cleveland Clinic that whole-body imaging carries “a potential for ‘overdiagnosis’, or the diagnosis of a condition that would not have gone on to cause significant symptoms or death”.
She described it as a growing side effect of advances in early detection.
When it might make sense
The calculation changes for people with symptoms or specific high-risk factors, such as a strong family history of certain cancers.
Doctors also draw a clear line between whole-body screening marketed to healthy consumers and targeted MRIs of the breast or brain, which remain recommended for specific clinical indications.
The common thread from radiologists and preventive medicine doctors is that a scan is most useful when it is ordered and interpreted by a doctor already familiar with your medical background, not when it is bought off the shelf from a wellness brand. – By Hanna Wickes/Miami Herald/tca/dpa
