The post looked simple enough: Kim Kardashian, hair pulled back in a ponytail, posed in front of an M.R.I. wearing scrubs branded with the logo of the medical imaging company Prenuvo.
“I recently did this @prenuvo scan and had to tell you all about this life saving machine,” she wrote. The M.R.I. could pick up on traces of cancer or other diseases, she said.
But the post was too simple, the University of Sydney public health researcher Brooke Nickel thought when she saw it in August 2023. What about the possible harms, she wondered? The test might find an extremely early stage cancer that would lead to a patient receiving invasive treatment, even though it may never have progressed to something more serious. Ms. Kardashian’s post made it seem like there were only upsides.
That post, and others like it, prompted Dr. Nickel to look into how other celebrities and influencers promote increasingly popular medical tests such as full-body M.R.I. scans. They also examined posts for products that claim to detect cancer in blood or analyze a hormone linked to fertility, testosterone levels and the gut microbiome.
The results of that study, which scrutinized nearly 1,000 TikTok and Instagram posts from accounts with hundreds of millions of combined followers, were published Wednesday. The paper found that an overwhelming majority of these posts were misleading, painting an overly rosy picture of these tests and rarely including scientific evidence. Only 15 percent mentioned potential harms. And more than two-thirds came from accounts with financial ties to the products, like influencers offering discounts and receiving sales commissions.
“If this is how patients are getting all their information, it’s really unfortunate, because it’s completely acting like medical tests are a new cool pair of sneakers,” said Dr. Rebecca Smith-Bindman, director of the Radiology Outcomes Research Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.
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