In July 2023, a 35-year-old Manhattan man decided to undergo a full-body health scan, a celebrity-endorsed trend aimed at people anxious about their body’s secrets and moneyed enough to afford the knowledge.
The industry advertises that the MRI scans can detect hundreds of treacherous health conditions such as cancers and aneurysms before they become catastrophic. While the scans have been criticized as an extravagance within U.S. health care, proponents say they can offer peace of mind.
Sean Clifford had his scan done by Prenuvo, one of the most prominent companies in the field. Kim Kardashian has described its screenings as “life saving.” The company’s website says a 45-minute whole-body scan, now priced at $2,500, “can detect subtle changes early” and “spot potential issues before they become serious.”
The report based on Clifford’s scan indicated no major problems, according to a copy sent to him. But eight months later, he suffered a debilitating stroke, leaving him with paralysis in his left hand and left leg, according to a lawsuit he filed against Prenuvo and the doctor contracted to interpret the scan. He alleges that the company overlooked signs of trouble that appeared in the scans of his cerebral arteries.
The Prenuvo defendants “should have reasonably known about the safety hazards or risks of injury presented by the misinterpretation of the Prenuvo MRI scans by its machines,” according to Clifford’s lawsuit filed in September 2024. According to a radiologist cited in the lawsuit, Clifford’s health report “was an obvious miss. His cerebral and cerebellar vasculature were incorrectly described as normal.”
Clifford’s attorney, Neal Bhushan, said the family asked for privacy and declined further comment. The court records include a copy of Clifford’s Prenuvo report and other documentation, but his allegations, which the company has denied in court filings, have not been fully litigated. A judge’s decision last month allowed the case to move forward.
Prenuvo declined to comment on the litigation, but it said in a company statement that “we take any allegation seriously and are committed to addressing it through the appropriate legal process. Our focus remains on delivering safe, high quality, proactive care to the patients who place their trust in us every day.”
The lawsuit represents another aspect of the controversy over full-body scans, which have been criticized for detecting minor abnormalities that provoke unnecessary follow-up testing and for being overly broad. The use of MRI to conduct a full-body scan on healthy patients is a departure from its more common uses for targeted diagnoses and monitoring.
Amid burgeoning interest in personal health data, these concerns are sometimes overwhelmed by publicity from the technology’s high-profile advocates. Prenuvo has drawn a slate of investors including retired supermodel Cindy Crawford; the CEO of 23andMe Anne Wojcicki; and the investment firm Steel Perlot, whose chairman is Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive.
On her Instagram account, Crawford has posted a picture of herself and her husband with one of the Prenuvo scanners. “The couple that scans together, stays together,” she wrote.
Paris Hilton also endorsed the company, writing on Instagram she was “impressed” with her fast results. “I encourage every single one of you to go get a scan and make sure you are taking care of yourselves,” she wrote.
Among the skeptics are experts at the American College of Radiology, which warns in a statement on its website that “there is no documented evidence that total body screening is cost-efficient or effective in prolonging life.” The group said it is concerned that the scans could “lead to the identification of numerous nonspecific findings that will not ultimately improve patients’ health but will result in unnecessary follow-up testing and procedures, as well as significant expense.” Insurance rarely pays for the scans.
While much of the criticism of the scans has focused on the potential for false alarms, the Clifford lawsuit focuses on the converse — the possibility that the scans may miss critical problems.
The company suggests as much in the patient consent agreement that Clifford signed, noting “as with any medical test … there are limitations which make it impossible to detect all malignancies and conditions,” according to court documents.
Clifford’s legal complaint argued that a doctor contracted to review his Prenuvo scan missed clues to an imminent stroke.
An image of Clifford’s brain by Prenuvo shows that one of his cerebral arteries had dangerously narrowed, according to the lawsuit. Another image, taken after his stroke, shows a blockage at that point.
Clifford “sustained a catastrophic stroke on March 7, 2024 in the same exact area of the brain where he had the Prenuvo scan on July 15, 2023,” according to a radiologist’s report submitted by the plaintiffs. Had he known of the potential for a stroke, Clifford might have been treated with drugs, lifestyle changes, stents or “other minimally invasive measures, thereby eliminating and preventing the catastrophic stroke,” according to the lawsuit.
Mirza Rahman, a former president of the American College of Preventive Medicine, has been one of the foremost critics of the scans, arguing that the service exemplifies a problem in American health care: “The wealthy get too much of it and the poor do not get enough.”
Even the wealthy ought to be wary of what they are getting from the scans, Rahman said, questioning whether the service may overlook some conditions because of the time and attention needed to review them.
“Do the radiologists have sufficient time to carefully look at the bones, the vessels, the organs, and all the other information that is generated by such scans?” Rahman said. “That is a question that needs to be answered.”
Just as troubling, Rahman said, is that the possibility of missing a dangerous condition could provide a patient with a “false sense of reassurance and that they continue with lifestyle choices that may be detrimental.”
The company’s chief executive Andrew Lacy has boasted of its focus on accuracy.
“This is the only thing that we do — it’s not a side business,” Lacy said in a 2024 interview with Faces of Digital Health. “We are 100 percent focused on making sure that we have the best hardware, best software, best [artificial intelligence] and best radiologists so these exams are as accurate as they can be.”
Doctors typically use MRIs to focus on just one area of the body where a problem is suspected — not the entire body, said Max Wintermark, a doctor who is past president of the American Society of Neuroradiology and editor in chief of the American Journal of Neuroradiology.
“MRI is not generally recommended for patients without symptoms,” he said. “When I have a patient, I tailor the MRI to answer specific questions. You can’t image all body parts together in great detail without making the MRI scan more than 60 minutes.”
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