Before I got my Prenuvo MRI everything online said “don’t do this, man. You’ll find all sorts of things that will worry you that you wouldn’t be worried about if you didn’t do it”. That makes no sense to me. Totally irrational. So I did the scan and saw a bunch of things which had no clinical significance - including the amusing thing that I’m missing the transverse processes on a couple of vertebrae (easily explainable from a motorcycle accident that put me in the ICU). So I moved on, scan done, and with the docs in my family reviewing.

But a friend of mine went through a different diagnostic procedure and found things of equal clinical significance and went through a large number of interventions which he didn’t really need it now turns out. And then I understood why people provide this warning.

So the first question to ask yourself is which kind of person you are.

There is a chicken and egg problem with advanced diagnostics like Prenuvo. I’m optimistic that if all disease were to be caught early, (1) the health system would evolve what is standard of care downstream in the working up and treatment of findings and (2) as individuals we would be less likely to overreact in chasing stuff down and feeling anxious. As CEO of Prenuvo, we do our best to contextualize and risk stratify in what is an evolving practice.

Not really. Osteosarcoma rates have remained very stable for decades. Some young people are getting diagnosed with colon/breast cancer at increasing rates, but most of that comes down to better diagnostics and imagining, catching things at earlier ages.

But isn‘t colon cancer in young people primarily an example of rates actually increasing, because young people specifically often get easily dismissed based on their age.