Screening MRI finds something in 1 in 6 asymptomatic people

Référence

Gibson LM, Paul L, Chappell FM, et al. Potentially serious incidental findings on brain and body magnetic resonance imaging of apparently asymptomatic adults: systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ 2018;363:k4577.

Sommaire

These researchers identified 32 research studies that evaluated 27,643 patients by searching MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the citations of retrieved studies. They included studies that described the prevalence and types of incidental findings of MRI testing of the brain, thorax, abdomen, or brain and body of asymptomatic individuals. One researcher selected studies for inclusion and extracted the data, and a second author checked a sample. Most (20) of the studies were performed in Europe and the rest were performed in North America, Asia, and Australia. Overall, assuming that each finding was in a separate person, 16.9% of patients who had a brain and body MRI had a positive finding; 3.9% of individuals had potentially serious findings. Abdominal-only MRI resulted in findings in 6.4% of individuals, with 1.9% having potentially serious findings. Imaging the thorax discovered something 4.3% of the time, though only 1.3% of people had potentially serious findings. Brain MRI resulted in positive results in 3.1%; 1.4% of individuals had potentially serious findings. For each type of imaging, approximately half of the potentially serious findings were suspected malignancy, which on the surface sounds like a good thing to discover until we realize that many of these suspected tumors may not be destined to cause harm or might regress without treatment.