Bryan Johnson's routine MRI for cancer screening found severe jugular vein stenosis restricting blood flow to his neck and raising pressure in his skull. Daily physical therapy to fix his posture improved the condition, leading him to ask why standard medical screening doesn't catch these dangerous blockages.
I invested in this company that was doing extensive health and wellness testing. There was a substantially large percentage of people who found a life threatening time bomb. And it was always such a shocking event because the people would inevitably say, I just did my full annual physical. My doctor said, I'm all good, I feel great. So when I started measuring myself, I wanted to know what was going to be my first time bomb. And when I did find it, how bad is it going to be? In November, I had an MRI scan done just for preventative cancer screening. I found that I had a jugular vein stenosis. We had these two big veins on the side of our necks. They are the highways for blood. So the MRI showed that I had severe stenosis, severe cloggage, and it was causing intracranial pressures. My team and I went on this kind of code red alert. We didn't know how serious it was. Was I going to have a seizure? Was I going to have a stroke at any moment? How bad was it? And so we did a bunch of additional measurements. I have an ultrasound machine at the house. In the clinic, we did ultrasound measurements looking at natural flow. We did more MRIs. We did an MRV looking at all the vasculature of my upper chest, neck and head. We did two different tests looking at my eye. Your eyes have an insight into intracranial pressure for your brain. So anyways, I did all this testing. I started going to medications and we became expert at this given thing. And meanwhile, I'm doing PT every day to try to correct my posture. So I now am obsessed with posture because it so dramatically affects the flow. But it's really, I guess, like, this is not a part of normal care. Like, this has existed my whole life. No one has ever found it. It's like, why don't we know more about these things? Why aren't these standard, routine things for all of us?
