A special kind of full-body scan called MRI with a specific setting (STIR) can find cancer in kids with very high accuracy—correctly spotting it in almost all cases where it’s there and correctly saying it’s not there when it isn’t.

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Pro

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Against

Evidence from Studies

Supporting (1)

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Community contributions welcome

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Sensitivity and Specificity of Whole-body MRI for the Detection of Pediatric Malignancy

Cross-Sectional Study

Human

2023 Jan 1

This study checked if a special kind of full-body MRI scan could find cancer in kids, and it found that it correctly spotted cancer 93.8% of the time and correctly said no cancer was there 93.4% of the time — just like the claim said.

Contradicting (0)

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No contradicting evidence found

Gold Standard Evidence Needed

According to GRADE and EBM methodology, here is what ideal scientific evidence would look like to definitively prove or disprove this specific claim, ordered from strongest to weakest evidence.

Source Study

Sensitivity and Specificity of Whole-body MRI for the Detection of Pediatric Malignancy

Score: 30

DOI: 10.1097/MPH.0000000000002575

Similar Assertions

If a child gets a whole-body MRI and it comes back negative, there’s a 99.1% chance they don’t have cancer — so doctors can be very confident the child is cancer-free based on this scan.

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72%

Doctors might be able to use a full-body MRI scan as the first test to find cancer in kids, because one study showed it was good at spotting cancer and not giving false alarms — but this was only done in one hospital.

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70%