Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/10/full-body-mri-cancer-prenuvo/

By Elizabeth Dwoskin September 10, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

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Jessica Jensen always thought of herself as a healthy enough person. The Silicon Valley executive ate well and worked out once a week — all while ****juggling a job managing 500 people and her daughter, a soon-to-be middle-schooler.

But in spring 2021, she heard about Prenuvo, a boutique clinic offering a “full-body MRI.” ****While MRIs are typically used to diagnose a particular problem, Prenuvo touts the service as a routine preventive measure, like a colonoscopy or a mammogram. Jensen was intrigued, and her husband persuaded her to try the scan on the eve of her 50th birthday.

The day after the scan, which cost $2,499 out of pocket, a Prenuvo nurse called to tell Jensen the MRI had detected a hard-looking two millimeter cyst on her pancreas. Doctors confirmed her fears: She had stage 1 pancreatic cancer.

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Jensen, who had surgery to remove the mass — along with a third of her pancreas and her entire spleen — credits Prenuvo with saving her life.

“Doctors think that this is frivolous and extravagant and looking for problems that don’t exist,” said Jensen, the chief marketing officer for the job site Indeed. “ … I think that’s a pretty big hole in our medical consciousness.”

She’s one of a growing number of evangelists of the full body scan, a trend that has taken hold among wealthy denizens in ****places like Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. Though no official medical body has sanctioned the practice, celebrities and venture capitalists are flocking to a growing number of clinics — and flooding social media with chic scan pics.

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Though scanning companies say they aim to lower the cost of screening, right now full-body MRIs exist in ****a parallel medical system that serves the one percent. Kim Kardashian recently posted about her own scan, which she described as a “life saving machine” and hash-tagged #NotAnAd.

It also signals the next phase ****of the quantified self movement, which started among Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs who argued they could “bio-hack” their way to extended longevity by making health decisions based on reams of personalized data.

“For a lot of people with money here — especially post 2021 — the next frontier is your health,” said Kat Manalac, a partner at the start-up incubator Y Combinator.

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Flush with cash from a recent series of public offerings in tech, a younger moneyed generation has taken that ethos even further. They are funding a new wave of quantified health start-ups that promise elevated, individualized care powered by data and artificial intelligence.

These include primary care clinics like Forward Health, which offers “real-time” bloodwork, biometric monitoring, and preventive genetic counseling. There is Everlywell, which advertises home test kits, which detect problematic gut bacteria and food allergies, on Instagram. There’s Signos, which uses continuous glucose monitoring patches to offer real-time dietary and exercise recommendations via an app. A number of start-ups, including Ezra and Neko Health, also offer full-body scans.

One Ezra investor, Bryan Johnson, who sold his company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million a decade ago, says he spends $2 million on his own health annually. Earlier this year he received a blood plasma transfer from his 17-year-old son as a wellness experiment.

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A recent survey of ****3,000 Americans ****by A/B Consulting with the venture capital firm Maveron found that wealthier Americans — who made over $250,00 a year — ****were willing to go to extreme lengths to live longer. This includes paying out of pocket for risky new therapies, like gene editing. Manalac noted that social media advertising had propelled the popularity of scans — a pandemic-era trend in which medical experiences are being sold directly to consumers online.