Kim Kardashian spent $2,500 on a full-body MRI. Are these scans worth the cost? Here's what experts say.
Kim Kardashian recently took to Instagram to promote a product with a luxury price — but it wasn’t a designer’s new line or even a vampire facial.
The reality star and entrepreneur posted that she'd had a full-body MRI-like scan. "It has really saved some of my friends' lives and I just wanted to share," Kardashian wrote of her experience with Prenuvo, a medical company offering screenings outside the traditional medical system.
Kardashian even included the hashtag #NotAnAd to tell followers that she wasn’t getting paid for the promotion — she was just a fan.
Not every follower was, however. With a price tag of $2,499 for a full-body scan ($999 for just the torso and $1,799 for the torso and head, according to the Prenuvo website), some followers said Kardashian was out of touch. One wrote, “Kim, this is for wealthy people. People can’t afford food right now.” Another added, “Kim people can’t afford cancer treatment after diagnosis, how can they afford preventative care.”
While Kardashian’s praise of Prenuvo may have come with some backlash, CEO Andrew Lacy tells Yahoo Life that the closest thing that existed before Prenuvo came along cost around $30,000. The Prenuvo team’s goal, however, is to make the machine more accessible to all — not just the Kardashians of the world.
“When we started Prenuvo, the founding team looked each other in the eye and said that our goal is not to be a concierge medical service for the wealthy, but to really scale up the technology and to engage with the health system and insurance companies and find ways for it to be covered,” he says. “Prenuvo, we believe, represents that transformative approach to health care, [which is] rooted in preventative health and rejects the current approach, which is very much about reactive medicine.”
Lacy believes that integrating technology like Prenuvo into the health care system would benefit everyone from both a financial and physical health standpoint.
“I believe with our technology that we could screen for just the torso, which is maybe 90% of the cancers that we are affected by, in the entire adult population [of the United States] every two years for $50 billion,” he says. “That’s a huge amount of money. But we spend maybe $130 billion on late-stage cancer drugs. Imagine a world where the only cancer is cancer caught at stage I. Financially, it’s much less expensive to treat those patients, and many more people would survive. How do you measure the cost of a human life?”
What do experts want you to know about Prenuvo? Here’s what you need to know.
Is this medically necessary?
Dr. Joann Elmore, a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, says, “Right now, there is no evidence that supports whole-body MRI screening exams as a preventive health procedure. There is no data that getting a whole-body MRI exam will help you live longer. Medical professional societies, such as the American College of Preventive Medicine, do not recommend whole-body scans. These types of elective screening exams provide little benefit to asymptomatic people.”
Not everyone in the medical community agrees. Dr. Ryan Brunsing, director of MRI at Stanford Health Care, says he supports whole-body MRI screening “both for its current uses and its potential as MRI technology continues to improve.”
However, he says, “It is important to understand that whole-body MRI does not provide a ‘catch-all’ MRI scan. It can have artifacts that hide pathology and will not be able to detect every cancer that develops in the body, at least not currently. Perhaps most important, current whole-body MRI does not replace more established surveillance tools like colonoscopy, Pap smear or mammography for cancer detection. Until we have more data on this, it is best thought of as an adjunct to these other tools, and I would not call it medically necessary except in rare instances.”
Should I be concerned about radiation?
If you do undergo a whole-body MRI like Prenuvo’s, one thing you don’t have to worry about is radiation. “MRI scans do not carry the risk of ionizing radiation, so there is no increased risk of cancer, unlike CT and PET,” says Brunsing.
Prenuvo confirms that its machine is radiation-free and that there is “no risk when it comes to doing multiple scans.”
What are the drawbacks of a whole-body MRI, like Prenuvo’s?
There are some things to consider before undergoing Prenuvo, say experts.
“There is more harm beyond the thousands of dollars someone might spend to obtain a whole-body MRI,” says Elmore. This includes the “anxiety and claustrophobia” that may come with getting scanned, but it also may reveal “subtle changes” inside one’s body that are ultimately “of no clinical significance — they won’t hurt patients or cause harm.”
Patients prone to anxiety may face “serious mental health consequences” from undergoing a whole-body MRI, as “the likelihood that a given finding will be benign increases the younger you are, and so the likelihood that a finding will cause unnecessary anxiety or further cost will also likely increase,” says Brunsing.
Lacy, however, believes that getting a clean bill of health from a whole-body MRI may be beneficial to one’s mental health. He says that after his first scan, “I learned that there was nothing crazy going on. I got some insight and that peace of mind. I felt like I was bouncing off the walls for two or three weeks.”
Can Prenuvo really guarantee that I’m healthy?
Brunsing says that “the benefits of whole-body MRI screening of the general population are less clear at this point.”
“For an otherwise healthy person, it is far more likely that a random whole-body MRI will find something that is benign that is of no clinical significance than it is to find early cancer,” he explains. “This can result in further costs to the patient both in terms of time and money. In some instances, this will result in unnecessary interventions such as biopsies.”
Brunsing also says it’s important not to skip other screenings, even if you do undergo a whole-body MRI; like any technology, it can be “prone to misses and errors.”
“It is another tool used to screen for disease, mostly cancer, and does not replace other forms of cancer surveillance such as colonoscopy or mammography,” he says. “The younger you are, the more likely it is that a finding will be benign, and the less likely it is the exam will benefit you. Empowered with that knowledge, I think one can make a reasonable and informed decision about whether a whole-body MRI exam is right for them.”
