The new status symbol is a full-body MRI

NEW YORK – For US$2,499 (S$3,410), Prenuvo will try to predict your future.

The company offers a roughly hour-long session of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that scans your entire body, searching for early signs of cancer, aneurysms, liver diseases and even multiple sclerosis.

In recent months, images of celebrities and influencers posing in branded scrubs in front of a glossy, cylindrical MRI machine have begun to pop up on social media with notable frequency.

American reality television star Kim Kardashian wore slippers in the Instagram post she shared with her 364 million followers in August, writing in the caption that Prenuvo “has really saved some of my friends’ lives”.

In May, American TV host Maria Menounos said a Prenuvo scan had alerted her to a mass that turned out to be Stage 2 pancreatic cancer.

Prenuvo does not pay anyone to promote its products, said the company’s founder and chief executive Andrew Lacy, but it does offer free scans to influencers and prominent figures in the wellness industry “in exchange for an honest review, if they feel like it”.

Some people also receive discount codes they can share on social media, offering their followers hundreds of dollars off the cost of a scan.

The company has sought a glamorous crowd.

During New York Fashion Week in early September, it coordinated with fashion public relations agency Lucien Pages to set up appointments for a few influential people in the fashion world, according to the agency.

They included French fashion editor Olivier Zahm, who wrote on Instagram on Sept 13 that he went to get his scan between runway shows.

American designer Zac Posen, model Lily Aldridge and Vogue editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson have also posted about the scans.

Many celebrities talk about their health on social media, sharing post-mammogram photos or promoting dubious procedures such as colonics and intravenous drips.

But the ones documenting their body scans – complete with nearly identical photo ops – have taken the celebrity health endorsement to new heights in terms of cost.

High-profile proponents have made Prenuvo perhaps the most prominent in a crop of companies offering whole-body scans that are generally not covered by insurance.

There are also Ezra, simonONE and Stockholm-based Neko Health.

“It’s completely understandable why you’d want to find cancer early,” said Dr Rebecca Smith-Bindman, director of the Radiology Outcomes Research Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. “It would absolutely give you that sense of control over it.”

Most cancers can be treated if they are detected early, she added. But those are largely detectable via other means, including the cancer screening schedule your doctor recommends for you – which is typically covered by insurance.

And considerable harm can come from screening, she and other experts said.

In April, the American College of Radiology released a statement saying there was “no documented evidence that total body screening is cost-efficient or effective in prolonging life” and expressing concern that scans could lead to “non-specific findings” that require extensive, expensive follow-up.

Dr Larry Norton, a breast oncologist and medical director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Centre at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, said “there’s just no evidence to support” healthy people undergoing full-body MRI screening, even for people who have a family history of cancer.

Dr Smith-Bindman, who has a family history of cancer, said she would not consider getting a full-body scan like Prenuvo’s.

Prenuvo’s visibility on social media is unusual, said health economist Joshua Cohen.

Other diagnostic scans, such as X-rays for broken bones and positron emission tomography scans for Alzheimer’s disease, are prescribed by doctors after evaluation, not spread by word of mouth on Instagram.

That visibility has driven some people to book the scans despite feeling perfectly healthy.

One of them is 44-year-old Jennifer Jones in St Louis, who first heard about Prenuvo on social media. She said she wanted to get a scan in part because her sister has lung cancer.

Ms Jones was aware that many doctors are sceptical of the scans for healthy people, but she had “no doubts that it’s legit”. To her, the price is well worth it compared with the potential costs, financial and otherwise, of future illness.

“I would literally do anything to have preventive options,” she said.

Bodies commonly contain abnormalities, like lumps and masses and scars on organs, that can be detected by MRI.

Dr Smith-Bindman compared these with moles on the skin.

An MRI alone cannot always tell you whether a finding is benign or troubling, said Dr Dushyant Sahani, chair of radiology at the University of Washington, and patients often have to undergo more testing.

A representative from Prenuvo said that 5 per cent of people who get its scan are alerted to “potentially life-saving findings”.

Mr Lacy said the theoretical risks around false positives do not reflect Prenuvo’s technology, which he says is more precise than the computed tomography scans at the centre of much of the screening research.

But Dr Smith-Bindman said “the problem has to do with the profound, normal variation in our bodies”, and the likelihood of nodules and abnormalities that a very sensitive machine will find.

Preventive screenings will likely find early cancers, but not every instance of cancer develops into devastating disease, she added.

And once any abnormality is detected, doctors will pursue it.

This can result in “major surgery and radiation and chemotherapy”, she said, for an early cancer that might never have developed into a true health risk. NYTIMES