Last month, journalist and actor Maria Menounos told People that she’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer after having a full-body MRI scan. Do you need a full-body MRI scan? Here's what the experts say.
say their scans – which cost from about $500 to $2,500 – can detect hundreds of medical conditions, including early-stage cancers.
The problem is that full-body scans carry a risk of false-positive findings that can lead to unnecessary and potentially invasive follow-up testing and procedures that are not only expensive, but also anxiety-inducing, said, chair of the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the University of California, San Francisco.
The likelihood a whole-body MRI finds a serious condition that’s treatable is far lower than your risk of dying in a car accident , drowning while swimming , or being seriously injured from falling down stairs , Hess said. Plus, the issues these scans often discover tend to be on the “spectrum of normal” that typically do not require treatment, such as small brain aneurysms.
Additional testing with CT scans and positron emission tomography can also expose people to radiation that maylater in life, the American Academy of Family Physicians said in a statement that discouraged the use of whole-body scans for early cancer detection in people who don't have symptoms. Some procedures could cause complications as well, Hess said. For example, a biopsy of a small kidney lesion, which normally wouldn’t need testing, could cause internal bleeding.
that total body screening is cost-efficient or effective in prolonging life” in people with no symptoms, risk factors, or family history of disease, the group said in a statement posted in April. The FDA released a similar statement in 2017 regarding full-body CT scans, sayingExperts agree that Menounos's case is the rare exception to the rule. Although CT scans and other testing appeared normal, she kept having severe belly pain and diarrhea.
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