The promise is beautiful. Detect at an early stage of up to 500 diseases or cancers, even before the first symptoms arrived. It is the offer shared by influential celebrities in the United States, announcing a new questionable company.
His name: Prenua. For the modest sum of $ 2,500, she offers anyone to analyze her body per MRI, without a recipe. A millimeter scan per millimeter. “You can find a problem before it becomes an emergency,” promises the company in place, praising prevention in a country with a ruined health system.
“One in twenty exploration leads to a diagnosis that can save a life,” says Pénuido, not to mention the scientific publication.
Too beautiful, too false? The preventive interest of this system is questioned by many health professionals.
“I think it has not been scientifically demonstrated that this type of exams significantly improves the detection of certain diseases. They cite a detection rate of one in twenty cases, but modern medicine is based on facts. We must cite the sources in which we trust “, Nuance Alexis Tubiana, IGP Image of Grand Paris.
Hundreds of images to analyze, a risk of false positive
If magnetic resonance images are not dangerous, only contraindicated in some people, particularly pregnant women, can create an unnecessary form of anxiety. Because anomalies, or normal differences, can be identified without revealing real hazards.
“You must know that a whole body of MRI is hundreds of images to analyze. We can be helped by artificial intelligence tools in detection, but sometimes we discover an anomaly, or simply a variant of normal, which is not necessarily pathological.
Given the growing popularity of this type of services on the other side of the Atlantic, the American College of Radiology published a statement that says that “there is no evidence that the magnetic resonance of the entire body is effective to prolong life.”
Source: BFM TV
