A whole-body MRI revealed she had a brain aneurysm like Kim Kardashian. What happened?

Jennifer Worman is a fashion influencer. But this past November, she traded her usual luxury look for a hospital gown in downtown Chicago. She got a full-body MRI – something many celebrities have touted on social media in the last few years as the must-have test for early diagnosis. If you catch anything – no matter how minor – in your body, after all, that's better than not catching it, right?

Worman, 49, laid on a flat surface for the simonONE test like a typical MRI, after draping on that gown and cleansing her system with an enema. A technician told her what to do (and how to breathe). Even though she doesn't love small spaces, she didn't feel claustrophobic as the machine scanned her organs. Her brain, her liver, everything from her head to her pelvis. Beep. Beep. Beep. The whole process took less than an hour, like laying down to take a nap.

Four days later, her phone rang. They found something. She needed a CT scan. Gulp. It revealed "a very tiny aneurysm," she says.

A neurologist examined it further, noting it was "small enough that there was no emergency."

Whew.

A standard blood test shows you a lot – but as of now, it can only tell you so much. The benefit of a full-body MRI, according to SimonMed's Chief Medical Officer and Chief Innovation Officer Dr. Sean Raj, is that "you can start seeing things before those biomarkers in your blood start showing abnormalities."

Worman, like many Americans, doesn't always make her annual doctor visits. She works out and eats right but knows many are finding cancers earlier and earlier. Colorectal cancer is one of 17 different types of cancer rising for Gen X and millennials, according to American Cancer Society research published in 2024. Breast, liver and ovarian cancer are also rising. A full-body scan every few years is a small price to pay, in Worman's mind, for a wide-ranging check-up. But is it the right choice for everyone? That depends.

"I wish it was required for everybody," she says. "I do. I just think it's helpful. But I know not everybody likes to know things. Some people would prefer to know after they kind of feel something or hear something from a doctor."

What does it mean to be proactive about health care?

What were the next steps for Worman? "(The neurologist) said that he didn't feel like I needed to do anything, and that many people actually live with a small aneurysm," she adds. It's a lot like what recently happened when Kim Kardashian discovered one. Worman has a scan set up for 2026 to make sure it hasn't grown; the biggest things her doctor advised her to do were watch her cholesterol, blood pressure and stress levels. She should call 911 if she develops a severe headache or loses her sight.

Yes, it turned out to be nothing, but she's glad she got this preventative care, even if she's now going to need an annual scan every year (and pay for it) to check on her aneurysm. She's glad her boyfriend got the whole-body scan, too. He's having a growth removed from his lung in February. It's likely not cancerous but they don't want it to grow and affect his breathing.

SimonMed's full-body scan looks for everything from tumors to vascular problems. "We're looking for changes in all of your organs and looking for symptoms, again, before they become problems for you," Raj says. The company offers two packages: the traditional simonONE ($650, $950 at some locations) looks at your torso and solid organs in your abdomen and pelvis. Cancers form here, as well as chronic liver disease and kidney issues. SimonONE Plus ($1,250, $1,850 at some locations) also evaluates the brain and female reproductive organs and/or includes enhanced prostate cancer screening. The test is not covered by insurance.

The scan, like anything, isn't perfect. "The main arguments against whole body scanning would be, well, you're finding incidental findings that you would have never known," Raj says. You could go to the grave with an aneurysm or cancer without them ever causing you any discomfort. But what if you could stop an illness before it ravages your body? That's the cost-benefit patients must weigh when looking into these diagnostic tests.

Raj says the key is giving patients clear expectations ahead of time and actionable plans on what to do after the test, whatever it says.

SimonMed is in competition with services like Prenuvo which are costlier (its options range from $999 to $4,499). SimonMed focuses on more than just whole-body scans and performs ultrasounds, CTs and X-rays.

There's no large, randomized trial indicating whole-body MRI scans alone reduce overall mortality. Still, according to Raj, "we know in our internal data that we're picking up on finding small, small cancers, which, if we have the luxury to scale the study, then it may actually show some meaningful mortality reduction. But what we do know is that patients that come see us are routed into care coordination, are routed for additional imaging." This may stop cancers from being found too late, but it also increases the financial burden on the consumer to seek additional testing. Again, it's weighing the risks and benefits, like multi-cancer early detection (MCED) blood tests.

"Especially after COVID, there's a tremendous hunger for the consumer to want to be healthy and want to be proactive about their health care," Raj adds.

It's how best to be proactive that's still in question.