Kim Kardashian called Prenuvo’s $2,500 full-body MRI a lifesaving machine. A New York malpractice suit and peer-reviewed data on false positives tell a more complicated story about screening healthy people.
Kim Kardashian called it a lifesaving machine. In August 2023 she posted to her 363 million Instagram followers about the full-body MRI she had undergone at Prenuvo. “The Prenuvo full-body scan has the ability to detect cancer and diseases such as aneurysms in its earliest stages, before symptoms arise,” she wrote. “It was like getting a MRI for an hour with no radiation. It has really saved some of my friends lives and I just wanted to share.”
Kardashian’s mother, Kris Jenner, underwent the same scan on an episode of the family’s Hulu series. Paris Hilton gave the company a mention on her own Instagram. The television host Maria Menounos credited a Prenuvo MRI with catching her stage 2 pancreatic cancer. Cindy Crawford and her husband Rande Gerber are investors, as is the 23andMe chief executive Anne Wojcicki. The competitor Ezra was acquired last year by Function Health, whose backers include Matt Damon and Kevin Hart, and now sells a 22-minute full-body MRI for $499, down from $1,500, according to Fierce Healthcare.
The pitch is this: An hour inside the tube, no radiation, and the promise that an MRI can show a healthy person the disease they do not yet know they have. A $2,500 scan has become the wellness flex of the moment, ordered the way an earlier generation ordered a juice cleanse, except that this one comes with a diagnosis. But what happens when the scan is wrong?
The Prenuvo lawsuit that alleges a scan missed a stroke
Sean Clifford was 37 when he lay down inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine at a Prenuvo clinic in Manhattan and paid $2,500 for the privilege. The scan was elective. Nothing hurt. He had no symptoms and no physician referral, only the proposition at the center of Prenuvo’s business. Court filings place the appointment on July 15, 2023.
Roughly eight months later, on March 7, 2024, Clifford suffered what his attorneys describe as a catastrophic stroke while traveling for work in Miami. He was left with paralysis in his left hand and leg, weakness along his left side, impaired vision, anxiety, depression, and chronic headaches. In a complaint filed that September in New York State Supreme Court, Clifford alleges that the radiologist who read his images, William A. Weiner, an independent contractor with Nexray Medical Imaging, described his cerebral vasculature as normal when it was not. A neurologist retained by the family identified what the complaint calls “abrupt focal 60% narrowing and irregularity of the proximal right middle cerebral artery.” The filing argues the consequence directly: “This stenotic vessel could have been treated with targeted stenting or other minimally invasive measures, thereby eliminating and preventing the catastrophic stroke.”
Prenuvo has said it does not comment on pending litigation. Its November 2024 answer states that “the injuries sustained by the plaintiff(s) were not as the result of any culpable conduct of the defendants.” The company has since tried to move the case out of New York, arguing that a choice-of-law clause in its patient agreement should route the dispute to California, where malpractice damages are capped. “Prenuvo’s nexus to California is clear,” wrote its attorney, Joy Woda Schneider. Clifford’s attorney, Neal Bhushan of the Jacob Fuchsberg Law Firm in New York, told Radiology Business by email: “This pattern shows that Prenuvo is trying every possible procedural angle to limit plaintiffs’ recovery.” He added, “We remain confident, however, that the case will proceed in New York County Supreme Court under New York law and look forward to moving ahead with depositions.”
Why radiologists say whole body MRI screening is a bad idea
Radiologists watched the celebrity endorsements arrive with something short of enthusiasm. Matthew Davenport, vice chair of the American College of Radiology’s Quality and Safety Commission and a professor of radiology at Michigan Medicine, called the service a “terrible idea” in an interview with Insider. Speaking to Fortune, he laid out the mechanism of the harm. “Knowing is not always to your advantage if what you learn doesn’t have a clear pathway,” he said. And on what the scans mostly turn up: “There’s a much smaller proportion of aggressive diseases, which are the ones we’re trying to find, but we’re lost in the haystack of all the other stuff.” By Davenport’s account, 20 to 40 percent of cross-sectional imaging studies produce an incidental finding.
Brian N. Dontchos and Manjiri Dighe, radiologists at Fred Hutch Cancer Center and UW Medicine, published a review of the literature in August 2025 and reached a conclusion their institutions have since adopted as policy. “The hierarchical level of available evidence for whole-body MRI is low,” they wrote. “Long-term patient outcomes and cost-effectiveness are not fully evaluated.” Consequently, they note, “Fred Hutch and UW Medicine do not offer this type of examination and radiologists will not provide official reinterpretations of outside whole-body MRI exams.”
The numbers they assemble explain the reticence. A systematic review of 12 whole-body MRI studies found that 95 percent of 6,214 patients had abnormal findings, and that roughly 30 percent had findings requiring further oncologic evaluation, while 1.8 percent proved to have a malignancy. At the level of individual lesions, of 17,961 abnormal findings, 91 percent were judged benign and irrelevant. A meta-analysis by Petralia and colleagues covering 5,809 asymptomatic subjects found suspicion of malignancy in 2 percent, with histologically confirmed cancers in 1.5 percent of a 3,287-person subset. In one single-institution study of 22 healthy adults, only one malignancy was found, incidental findings appeared in 20 patients, two reports came back clean, and 68 percent of subjects required further investigation. A systematic review by Gibson and colleagues across 32 studies produced a pooled prevalence of 3.9 percent for potentially serious incidental findings, roughly half of them suspected malignancies.
The Fred Hutch review also observes that Prenuvo’s breast imaging “is not standard of care compared to a standard clinical breast MRI because it lacks intravenous contrast, as required by the American College of Radiology for accreditation.”
The business Is scaling faster than the science
Prenuvo was founded in 2018 and recently raised more than $120 million in a Series B round. It operates roughly 24 locations with another 16 announced. Its scanners, the company says, check for over 500 conditions, and it estimates that one in every 20 patients receives what it describes as a lifesaving diagnosis. Alina Ioani, the company’s vice president of business development and strategic partnerships, framed the premise for Who What Wear in January: “In today’s healthcare system, imaging is typically ordered in response to pain, concern, or suspected disease. Proactive whole-body MRI flips that model, helping people walk away with reassurance or clear next steps.”
Kardashian called it a lifesaving machine. The radiologists who read the scans say it mostly finds what was never going to hurt you anyway, unless, like in Clifford’s case, it misses the mark entirely.
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