Health Claims

Even as people get older—from their 20s to their 80s and beyond—the number of people who have tiny, undetected thyroid cancer stays about the same, hovering between 11.5% and 13.4%.

Descriptive

When doctors examine entire thyroid glands after death, they find thyroid cancer more often than when they only check part of the gland — so how they look at the gland changes how common the cancer seems to be.

Descriptive

Using whole-body MRI to screen everyone for cancer isn't a good idea right now because it often misses cancers, finds too many harmless things that cause worry, isn't done the same way everywhere, and we don't know if it actually helps people live longer or healthier lives.

Descriptive

We don’t have enough long-term data to know if getting a full-body MRI scan when you feel fine actually helps people live longer or saves money — so doctors can’t say if it’s worth doing.

Descriptive

There's no universal rulebook for using full-body MRI scans to check for cancer, so different hospitals do it differently—making it hard to compare results or use it reliably everywhere.

Descriptive

Getting a full-body MRI often finds weird little things that aren’t actually a problem, which can lead to more tests and stress — but we don’t yet know if all this causes more harm than good.

Correlational

If you get a full-body MRI scan and have no symptoms or known cancer risks, about 1 in 60 people might be found to have cancer they didn’t know about — so it’s kind of helpful, but not super reliable, for finding hidden cancers in healthy people.

Descriptive

To make sure different hospitals and researchers can compare MRI scans properly, they all need to use the same checklist—like ONCO-RADS—so their data matches up and can be combined for bigger studies.

Descriptive

Instead of choosing between whole-body MRI and regular cancer tests like mammograms, doctors should use both together — because MRI can find cancers that other tests don’t check for.

Descriptive

If a whole-body MRI scan comes back negative, there’s a 99.8% chance you don’t have any new cancer developing in the short term—especially if you didn’t need a biopsy after the scan.

Quantitative

When doctors use full-body MRI scans on people who feel fine, about two out of three cancers they find are in body parts that don’t usually get checked during routine screenings—so this scan might catch cancers other tests miss.

Descriptive

A full-body MRI scan can find cancer in about 1 to 2 out of every 100 people who feel fine and have no symptoms — and that’s more than what mammograms or lung CT scans find on their own, so it might be a good way to catch multiple types of cancer early.

Quantitative

In a study where people got full-body MRI scans for research, about 1 in 3 were told they had some unexpected health finding that might need attention.

Descriptive

A team of experts from different fields can help decide which unexpected health findings from a full-body MRI scan should be told to the person being scanned—and they got it right about 8 out of 10 times.

Descriptive

When doctors do full-body scans for research, less than half a percent of unexpected findings turn out to be serious enough to need urgent medical attention.

Quantitative

When doctors scan someone’s whole body for research, they sometimes find unexpected things — and more than half the time, they can’t tell if those things are harmless or dangerous without doing more tests.

Quantitative

When adults get a full-body MRI scan for research, about 1 in 3 people end up with unexpected findings—most often in their belly, kidneys, or bones—even though they weren’t being checked for those issues.

Descriptive

Testing healthy older women for ovarian cancer with blood tests or ultrasounds doesn’t save lives and often leads to risky surgeries that aren’t needed — so it’s not worth doing.

Causal

When checking for ovarian cancer, using a combination of tests finds more cancers early than using just an ultrasound, but both methods are really good at saying you don’t have cancer when you really don’t.

Quantitative

When doctors use both a blood test and an ultrasound to check for ovarian cancer, fewer women end up having unnecessary surgeries compared to using just the ultrasound — so the combo method is safer in that way.

Quantitative

For women over 50 who aren’t at high risk for ovarian cancer, getting regular vaginal ultrasounds doesn’t help find the cancer sooner or save more lives compared to not getting screened at all — even after 16 years.

Causal

Getting yearly blood tests and ultrasounds for women over 50 might catch more ovarian cancers early, but it doesn’t help them live longer, even after 16 years.

Quantitative

In 2015, South Korea decided not to routinely scan healthy people’s necks with ultrasound to check for thyroid cancer, because they thought it wasn’t helpful for most people.

Descriptive

In South Korea, many people and doctors didn’t want to stop checking for thyroid cancer so often, even when it might not be needed—some even said it was a right everyone should have, suggesting that money and institutions might be pushing unnecessary tests.

Descriptive