Should You Invest in a Whole-Body Scan?

IN CANADA, eligibility for medical screenings is based on factors like age, sex and family history. But privately owned, for-profit clinics across the country offer whole-body MRI scans that can purportedly catch and treat abnormalities earlier. The price tag? Anywhere from $3,000 to $3,500. Are these scans worth the steep cost? Two Canadian doctors weigh in.

- Andrea Yu

Why get a whole-body scan?

“The most common reason people do this is because they think it will find early-stage cancers,” says Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and a general internal medicine physician at Toronto’s University Health Network.

But she cautions that, for most people, the risks overall outweigh the benefits. “Quite often, ‘incidental findings’—meaning things that are variants of normal—get picked up,” she says. “This can lead to a cascade of other tests for what most often are benign findings.” In fact, a 2010 literature review from the British Journal of Radiology found that on average, 23 percent of diagnostic imaging resulted in at least one incidental finding.

What other risks and concerns can these scans pose?