Is a full-body scan worth $2,500?

A friend posts their scan results. All clear, with a photo of them grinning next to the machine. For a second you think, "I should do that."

Then you see the price, $2,500, and it goes on the list of things to do once life calms down.

Last week a Bachelor star, Joe Amabile, told USA Today about the Prenuvo scan that found a small tumor in his brain. It's the kind of story the scan companies run on. What made it worth reading was the next line: his own doctors' first reaction was that this is exactly why they don't recommend full-body scans. His surgeon thought the tumor might have caused a seizure in 5 to 10 years. His oncologist thought it might never have bothered him for 30.

The 3 most-marketed health checks find a lot, and none of them has been shown to help you live longer. What they reliably produce is more tests.

Monday was the list of checks with real evidence behind them. Today is the other half: full-body MRI, the executive check-up and the 50-cancer blood test, and what actually happened to the people who had them. The BBC spent 28 minutes on the scan business on October 13, and Prenuvo's founder was making the case for it on the mindbodygreen podcast two weeks later, so you'll be hearing about this either way.

Three tests, three sets of numbers. The first thing to know about each one is what a positive result sets in motion.

Full-body MRI (Prenuvo, Ezra, Neko). It finds something in almost everyone. In October, Weill Cornell researchers pooled every study of whole-body MRI in people with no symptoms, 18,043 scans across 17 studies, in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Here's what the scans turned up:

Prenuvo's own data, from 78,000 of its customers, says 7% had a brain finding its radiologists called significant. The company presents that as a reason to scan. Read it the other way: 1 person in 14 walks out with a brain lesion to worry about, and almost all of them would have lived their whole lives never knowing. Amabile's tumor was found. So was Busy Philipps' stomach cancer, which she put on the cover of People in September. What you don't see is the thousands of people who had a scan, a scare, a biopsy, and nothing.

The executive check-up. It's the most studied of the three, and the result is the same number twice. Cochrane pulled together 17 randomized trials of general health checks, 251,891 adults followed for up to 30 years. Deaths over that time: 68 per 1,000 in people offered the check-up, 68 per 1,000 in people who weren't. Cancer deaths, 26 per 1,000 either way. Heart deaths, no difference. The check-ups found more high blood pressure and more high cholesterol, and it made no difference to who died.

One reason is that the tests that do move the needle, the ones on Monday's list, are usually in there somewhere, buried under 40 others that don't. The other is that a yearly report full of green checks tells you nothing about the two numbers that were creeping up.

The 2026 version of the check-up is a blood panel you order yourself. Function Health is the big one in the US: $365 a year, 160-plus markers, two draws, no doctor's visit. Most of those 160 have no trial behind them and a few will come back "out of range" for no reason, which is the same problem as the MRI on a smaller scale. The useful part is that ApoB, Lp(a) and HbA1c are in there, and for a lot of readers that's the easiest way to get Monday's blood tests done without talking a doctor into it. Read the 4 that matter and treat the rest as noise.

The 50-cancer blood test (Galleri). This one has a real trial behind it, and it's the most interesting of the three. The NHS randomized 142,250 people aged 50 to 77 to a yearly Galleri test or usual care, and published the result in NEJM in October. The goal was fewer cancers found at stage 3 or 4. It didn't happen: the rate was the same in both groups. Stage 4 alone was about 14% lower, though that was a secondary result and the main one didn't budge, and the company is leaning on it hard. Nobody knows yet whether anyone lived longer, because the trial wasn't long enough to measure it.

Here's why finding more isn't the same as living longer. Screening a body that feels fine finds two kinds of things: slow ones that would never have hurt you, and fast ones that are already too far along. Between them is a window where catching it early changes the ending. For bowel, breast and lung in smokers, that window has been measured and it's real. For the whole body at once, nobody has measured it, and the tests above are being sold as if they had.

There are people a full-body MRI is made for. If you carry a known cancer gene like Li-Fraumeni, or a strong family history across several cancers, yearly whole-body MRI is standard care and your specialist will arrange it. That's not what Prenuvo is selling to the rest of us.

One honest caveat. These numbers describe thousands of people, and you're one. Amabile's tumor was real and so was his surgery. The trials can't tell you which side of the line you'd land on, only that for most people it falls on the side of more appointments.

If you want the blood tests from Monday's list in the right words for your doctor, they're on p.21 of the Bloodwork Cheat Sheet.

Friday is your own screening schedule on one page, men and women side by side, with the one test on your row to book this weekend.

Until Friday.

Longevity Daily / The Building Decades