Can a full-body scan catch cancer in kids?
Sensitivity and Specificity of Whole-body MRI for the Detection of Pediatric Malignancy
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Surprising Findings
The negative predictive value of 99.1% is exceptionally high for a single imaging test in pediatrics.
Most diagnostic tools for cancer in children have lower NPVs because cancers are rare and hard to detect early—this suggests MRI might be far more reliable than assumed.
Practical Takeaways
If a child has unexplained symptoms and a whole-body MRI is ordered, a negative result can provide strong reassurance that cancer is extremely unlikely.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Surprising Findings
The negative predictive value of 99.1% is exceptionally high for a single imaging test in pediatrics.
Most diagnostic tools for cancer in children have lower NPVs because cancers are rare and hard to detect early—this suggests MRI might be far more reliable than assumed.
Practical Takeaways
If a child has unexplained symptoms and a whole-body MRI is ordered, a negative result can provide strong reassurance that cancer is extremely unlikely.
Publication
Journal
Journal of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology
Year
2022
Authors
T. Cochran, Sachit A. Patel, Travis Kruse, E. Lyden, S. Comer, J. Ford
Related Content
Claims (4)
Using a full-body MRI scan might help find cancers in body parts where doctors don’t normally screen people, like without a regular test.
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.
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.
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.