You probably know someone who looked perfectly healthy…
Felt a little off…
And then got diagnosed with stage IV cancer – out of nowhere.
I did too.
My grandmother felt completely fine. Then one day, she woke up feeling sick.
We went from doctor to doctor trying to figure out what was going on.
By the time she got an MRI, it was already late-stage gallbladder cancer.
She passed away six months later.
Gallbladder cancer unfortunately has no routine screening.
If she had access to full-body MRI earlier, I still wonder to this day what might have been different.
The problem with cancer screening
Let's start with a quick stat:
86% of cancers are found by accident or symptoms – not through routine screening.
(Source: NORC at the University of Chicago, 2022)
This is often when treatment options are limited and survival rates plummet. Only 14% of cancers are caught by current routine screening tests.
Why "stage" matters more than you think
There's a massive difference between Stage I and Stage IV cancer.
It's literally the difference between: curable vs. terminal.
Here's a quick breakdown:
- Stage 0: Pre-cancer or abnormal cells.
- Stage I: Small, contained tumor. Still local.
- Stage II: Larger tumor, possibly in nearby lymph nodes.
- Stage III: Spread to deeper tissues or more lymph nodes.
- Stage IV: Spread to distant parts of the body (aka metastatic cancer).
Once cancer hits your lymph nodes and bloodstream, it's like a passport to anywhere in your body.
Let's talk numbers – and why they matter
Here's what survival looks like if you catch it early vs. late:
| Cancer Type | 5-Year Survival (Stage I) | 5-Year Survival (Stage IV) | Detectable by TrueScan?* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bladder | 88% | 8% |  |
| Breast | 99% | 30% | |
| Cervical | 92% | 16% | |
| Colorectal | 91% | 14% |  (colonoscopy recommended) |
| Esophageal | 47% | 4% | |
| Gallbladder | 66% | 2% | |
| Kidney | 93% | 15% | |
| Larynx | 78% | 39% | |
| Liver | 80% | 3% | |
| Lung | 90% | 10% | (not micronodules) |
| Ovarian | 92% | 29% | |
| Pancreatic | 80% | 3% | |
| Prostate | 99% | 28% | |
| Stomach | 75% | 7% | ⚠️ Maybe (endoscopy recommended) |
| Testicular | 99% | 72% | |
| Thyroid | 99% | 28% | |
| Uterine | 95% | 17% | |
*Please remember: the TrueScan full-body MRI serves as an adjunct to, but does not replace, established screening tools like colonoscopy, mammography, Pap smears, and low-dose chest CT for high-risk individuals. It does not replace breast-specific screening, including mammography, ultrasound, or contrast-enhanced breast MRI. It is also not a replacement for dedicated diagnostic imaging when specific symptoms or findings arise.
Lung cancer is a great example.
90% 5-year survival if caught early.
10% 5-year survival if caught late.
Yet only 16% of lung cancers are diagnosed at an early stage.
No routine screening exists for lung cancer other than for high-risk former smokers. Lung cancer typically has zero symptoms until later stages, which makes screening vital for improving survival rates.
So what screenings do exist?
There are only 4 cancers with routine population-wide screening:
- Breast cancer (mammography)
- Cervical cancer (Pap smear)
- Colorectal cancer (colonoscopy)
- Lung cancer (low-dose CT – but only for high-risk people)
That's it.
If you develop any other kind of cancer (and there are dozens), you're relying on:
- Random blood tests
- Incidental imaging
- Dumb luck
That's not a strategy. That's a coin toss.
"Just wait for symptoms" is a death sentence
Symptoms usually show up after cancer has spread.
By that point, treatment is harder and you are often incurable.
It's why cancer is still the second leading cause of death in the U.S. – killing over 600,000 people per year.
Take pancreatic cancer.
The average stage at diagnosis is 3.2 – meaning most cases are already advanced.
In fact, nearly half of pancreatic cancers are diagnosed at Stage IV, when the disease has already metastasized.
The difference is staggering:
If caught early, 5-year survival rates are more than 26x higher.
Early-stage tumors can often be removed surgically, giving patients a cure.
And with rates rising, pancreatic cancer is projected to become the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths by 2030.
So where does full-body MRI fit in?
Full-body MRI isn't perfect – and we're the first to say that.
It's not great for:
- Blood-based cancers (e.g. leukemia is undetectable)
- Colorectal cancer
- Stomach cancer (tumors < 2–3cm may be too small to detect)
- Skin cancer
But for most solid tumors, it's one of the most powerful screening tools available because we can evaluate your major organs for solid tumors as early as Stage I.
We use advanced diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) sequences, which help distinguish malignant tumors from benign findings – one of the key reasons our scans are so effective at early cancer detection.
What we've seen at TrueScan
Since opening in December 2024, we've already helped countless people, both young and old, find early-stage cancers and other silent threats (like aneurysms).
Many of these patients felt completely normal.
Thankfully, they got a chance to act early.
The takeaway
Most cancers are diagnosed too late.
Current screening guidelines only cover a tiny slice of the cancer spectrum.
And yet, early-stage detection increases survival by as much as 90% in some cancers.
The problem is not that we don't have the technology.
It's that we're not using it soon enough.
