Am I rich enough to pay for my own full-body MRI scan for peace of mind? - National Post

Private clinics such as Prenuvo offer full-body MRI scans as a tool to detect abnormalities and diseases lurking in bodies. Photo by PrenuvoArticle contentSonia Keuroghlian’s husband, a radiologist, has seen cancer in people in their 20s and 30s, younger than the ages recommended for most publicly funded cancer screening.

So, when the Toronto couple turned 40, he suggested they undergo full-body MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans at a private clinic in Vancouver, where her husband is from, and where they were vacationing in August 2018, “just to make sure everything is OK,” Keuroghlian said.

She was healthy, active, fit, and feeling perfectly normal, which is why, when the radiologist later pulled up an image of a 10.5-centimetre tumour attached to the outside of her stomach, “my world turned upside down,” said Keuroghlian, a corporate lawyer.

“I had two kids at the time; they were six and eight. And the craziest part is that I didn’t feel anything.” The tumor, she was told, was like a water ballon “that squeezes its way between organs, so it moves with you and you don’t really feel it until it’s grown to the point where it’s attached to other organs.”

What followed was a “whole bunch of other imaging” back in Toronto and, later, laparoscopic surgery to remove the gastrointestinal tumour. “I was lucky because it hadn’t metastasized, so I didn’t need chemo or radiation.”

Eight years and a third child later, she’s cancer free. “I feel so lucky that we caught it when we did.”

Keuroghlian had her scan with Prenuvo, a Canadian-founded and now California-based provider of “proactive” whole body screening endorsed by Kate Hudson, Kim Kardashian and Jason Bateman.

To the chagrin of many medical groups who argue there is no sufficient evidence full-body scans are effective at prolonging life, the pricey scans are gaining popularity, with Prenuvo alone surpassing the 200,000-scans mark since setting up its first clinic in Vancouver in 2018, later expanding into California’s Silicon Valley and then across the United States.

Prenuvo founder and CEO Andrew Lacy said some clients have a family history of cancer or disease and are seeking screening “for peace of mind.”

“We’re able to pick up these conditions early — in the case of cancer, typically when it’s still localized to the organ of origin and when the patient is still asymptomatic.”

Others have indeterminate symptoms that aren’t being “quickly or easily resolved by the health system and they want to go and get the most advanced screening they can, to get to an answer to the problem.”

Lacy said “proactive health care,” as a sector, is growing 30 per cent a year. “We would love to be operating in more Canadian markets. There’s certainly tremendous demand.”

For a fee — roughly $2,500 to $3,000 at private clinics — the scans are marketed as a tool to detect diseases and abnormalities lurking inside asymptomatic bodies. In its promotional material, Prenuvo says whole body MRI can detect brain aneurysms at risk of rupture, kidney cancers, degenerative disc disease, adrenal masses, lymphoma and a host of other conditions.