Sarah Blackburn was one of many who jumped in on the hype to get a full-body MRI. The test as a preventative screening tool has been gaining popularity in recent years. Many already healthy individuals take the scan hoping to be reassured that nothing is out of the ordinary. But Blackburn had quite the opposite experience.
“I had a full-body MRI just for fun. No symptoms whatsoever,” Blackburn says in a viral TikTok video about her experience earlier this year. “Now I am scheduled to have an organ removed in two weeks.”
Blackburn decided to take Prenuvo’s $2,500 full-body MRI in Houston—the fast-growing company has been expanding across the U.S. after launching in Vancouver in 2018. While the scan is not a replacement for recommended routine screenings like mammograms and pap smears at your doctor’s office, the company claims its 60-minute test is an early detection and preventive health tool, scanning for hundreds of conditions and “silent killers like aneurysms,” according to the site. But for many, it’s just more data to store away because often, there is nothing to act on, which was the case with me when, as part of a story, I underwent a Prenuvo full-body MRI last year.
“I was so excited to get my results. I don’t know what I thought we were going to find. Now, looking back, I was just so certain that this was going to give me peace of mind and that they were not going to find anything serious,” Blackburn says.
After the scan, people receive a report that outlines each organ of the body and any informational or important findings. “I was treating it like a spa day. I was so excited, and taking pictures in my little scrubs,” Blackburn shares on TikTok. “It did kind of feel like a spa day, until it didn’t.”
Four days after her scan around 8:30 p.m., Blackburn was alerted that her results were ready. She posted screenshots of the results in her video.
“I went into a full blown panic attack,” she says. Marked in red letters under the circulatory system category, the words “important finding” sat. She had a splenic artery aneurysm, according to the report.
The finding’s description noted that while “the majority of splenic artery aneurysms are incidental findings … if a splenic artery aneurysm ruptures, there is a one in three mortality rate.”
“It was a really dark and hard two months, where I was spiraling and freaking out and seeing a lot of doctors and pretty much treating my body like glass because I had no idea about this,” Blackburn shares. “I literally felt like a ticking time bomb was found inside my body.”
After months of deliberation, Blackburn decided to get her spleen removed, and tells People that she had, in fact, had a lesion on a 2020 ultrasound that she had never learned about. “Read your radiology reports,” Blackburn told People. “I did not read it. I just thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to get told everything that needs attention.’ But, that was not the case.” A follow-up CT scan after the Prenuvo results found two anyeurums in her splenic artery.
While in some cases the full-body scans can uncover an important finding, it can also cause undue anxiety about things that are still in the range of normal, Dr. Matthew Davenport, the William Martel Collegiate professor of radiology and service chief and vice chair in the Department of Radiology at Michigan Medicine, previously told Fortune.
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“Knowing is not always to your advantage if what you learn doesn’t have a clear pathway. Sometimes when you learn a piece of information, you can be misdirected as to the importance of it,” he told Fortune. “You can learn something about yourself, but it can actually increase your uncertainty.”
Often, people may go down unnecessary rabbit holes and additional testing, he adds.
But for Blackburn, the scan caused her to act—and was, in fact, incredibly useful for her health. “I will be starting the journey of life without a spleen, which I think is going to be okay. It’s going to be better than having to live in fear of having a ruptured aneurism,” she says in the video.
Still, she says she has mixed feelings about recommending the scans to others, especially those who have severe health anxiety.
“I feel grateful,” Blackburn says. “I am happy that I know about this and had the chance to decide what I wanted to do moving forward, but … for the people who already have existing health anxiety, I truly don’t know if I can recommend it.”
