Maybe the right answer isn't to do a biopsy, but to monitor the area with follow-up scans? It seems like that addresses much of the harm that a false positive can cause (invasive biopsy leading to complications) while maintaining most of the gains (still very early detection).
How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
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Re: How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
#12There’s a major difference between having insurance cover something (socialized cost, immediately drives up provider fees for bizarre reasons) and letting the market allow people to buy it themselves (individual cost, the market drives the cost down fast and hard). Notice the pattern with LASIK and GLP1 where lack of insurance coverage has counterintuitively made it cheaper and more accessible.
Let everyone who wants to pay get their scans! But don’t make me pay for you
Re: How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
#13“ One study in 2020 found that 95% of asymptomatic patients had some type of "abnormal" finding, but just 1.8% of these findings were indeed cancer.”
This has been my experience. And I’ve had oncologists echo exactly this. In the words of one: MRIs find too much.
The CT and the PET/CT are the gold standards for finding cancer, finding recurrences, and staging cancer. The trouble is the radiation dose.
MRI provides very inconclusive results. You’ll see something but it’ll be unclear what it is. And often what you see is not even visible on a CT. Or it’s visible on a PET/CT and is showing metabolic activity indicating its cancer.
MRIs are great for certain things like herniated disks in your back. They suck at cancer.
Re: How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
#14I pay an extra $60 a year to have my ophthalmologist take a digital image of my retina. It comes back as normal every year, but if something does change we can diff the image against the baseline. Maybe I don't want to look for cancer right now but if I spend $1,000 every 5 years to take an image for later use... isn't that useful?
Might be, but in the context it's also worth asking what better options you have for your health with that $1000.
(for some people that question may not apply, of course, but at a population level it does, and we have population-level questions about effective use of MRI time.). And if there's something better, you should spend it on that and then ask the question _again_. So it could be that getting a whole-body MRI is something like $30k down the list of best ways to spend money for improved health.
I'm not sure what the best use of $1k is from a health standpoint is, just noting that it's good to have a comparator.
Re: How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
#15“ One study in 2020 found that 95% of asymptomatic patients had some type of "abnormal" finding, but just 1.8% of these findings were indeed cancer.” This has been my experience. And I’ve had oncologists echo exactly this. In the words of one: MRIs find too much. The CT and the PET/CT are the gold standards for finding cancer, finding recurrences, and staging cancer. The trouble is the radiation dose. MRI provides ve…
Anecdotal evidence to confirm: I had two false alarms from an unrelated MRI scan, and beside wasting a lot of time on diagnosing them - it was also extremely stressful.
My father is a part of "full body PET scan every 3 years" program as part of post - cancer treatment, and it worked twice: early detected lung and prostate tumors, both removed.
Re: How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
#16Answering the question in the title... > One study in 2020 found that 95% of asymptomatic patients had some type of "abnormal" finding, but just 1.8% of these findings were indeed cancer. So a bit less than 1.8% of the time in this study > Prenuvo's recent Polaris Study followed 1,011 patients for at least one year following a whole-body MRI scan. Of these patients, 41 had biopsies. More than half of the 41 were diag…
> You're finding something that never would have caused you any problem in your life Is it though? Isn't it possible you could be early-detecting something serious that is much easier to treat now vs when symptoms appear?
> Isn't it possible you could be early-detecting something serious that is much easier to treat now vs when symptoms appear?
It could be. It could also be the cade that you undergo invasive surgery for something that would have never caused you problems within your life. The problem is that cancer isn‘t cancer. Even if it originates from the same tissue, some tumors behave very different from others.
Re: How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
#17“ One study in 2020 found that 95% of asymptomatic patients had some type of "abnormal" finding, but just 1.8% of these findings were indeed cancer.” This has been my experience. And I’ve had oncologists echo exactly this. In the words of one: MRIs find too much. The CT and the PET/CT are the gold standards for finding cancer, finding recurrences, and staging cancer. The trouble is the radiation dose. MRI provides ve…
Anecdotal evidence to confirm: I had two false alarms from an unrelated MRI scan, and beside wasting a lot of time on diagnosing them - it was also extremely stressful. My father is a part of "full body PET scan every 3 years" program as part of post - cancer treatment, and it worked twice: early detected lung and prostate tumors, both removed.
> My father is a part of "full body PET scan every 3 years" program as part of post - cancer treatment,
These treatments are wonderful and it is great that they exist. But many people fail to understand the difference in terms of pretest probability, etc.
I can absolutely see the heavy psychological impact pending biopsy results may have. People are quick to discount these issues when you raise them as a concern, but only if they never went through this stress themselves
Re: How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
#18Maybe the right answer isn't to do a biopsy, but to monitor the area with follow-up scans? It seems like that addresses much of the harm that a false positive can cause (invasive biopsy leading to complications) while maintaining most of the gains (still very early detection).
The problem is that just because you‘re detecting something, it does not mean it is worth watching. Bodies are not standardized and most people habe something off. But you can‘t really reschedule everybody constantly, as that would entirely break the concept.
Re: How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
#19I pay an extra $60 a year to have my ophthalmologist take a digital image of my retina. It comes back as normal every year, but if something does change we can diff the image against the baseline. Maybe I don't want to look for cancer right now but if I spend $1,000 every 5 years to take an image for later use... isn't that useful?
Er wait is retinal cancer a thing?
Yes. You can also have melanoma on your uvea
Re: How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
#20Just to point out, cancer isn't the only reason to get these. Aneurisms, hemachromatosis, etc can all be serious. I know someone who got scanned for $500 and they caught hemachromatosis via iron deposits in the liver. Much better than eventual chirrosis and liver failure.