Top 3 Longevity Tests for 2025

Foreign. Talk to you about three things you should do for 20, 25. Health commitments to do that you might not have thought about. Now, there's a lot of things you might be doing for exercise and dieting, lifestyle, meditation, sauna, cold plunges, that's all good. These are things that can have a meaningful impact on your longevity. And it's picking up things before they kill you. So we're looking at neurocognitive decline, cardiovascular disease and cancer, the three big killers of people. Now, typically, we diagnose these conditions, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and neurocognitive line once they occur. But we have the ability to screen for them years or decades in advance. I'm gonna tell you about the three tests you can do, and each side of the test there's some little variation. So let's talk about the first one, which is cardiovascular disease. You know, based on your age, that's the most likely one to kill you because that's the number one killer of human beings in America. And cardiovascular disease, we usually pick it up once you're having chest pain or you have the heart attack or a stroke, and by that point you've got the disease. And it's, it can be managed, but you have the disease, but we can screen for it in advance. Now, the way we like to screen for this is called a cimt. It's an ultrasound called CIMT Carotid Intima Media thickness test. And this looks at your carotid artery, which is right in your neck. So that's a window into your entire cardiovascular system. There's one area of the carotid artery that gives you an average amount of disease for the entire body or absence of disease. We look at the thickness of this lining and the amount of what's called plaque burden. Plaque is little hardening of the arteries. There's little things that occur inside the arteries that thicken over time and cause stroke or a heart attack. Now, we can go a step further than that with other testing, but that's a good first screening test. If your CIMT shows that your cardiovascular age is much younger than you are, you're in pretty good shape. Keep doing what you're doing, you're not going to have a heart attack or stroke in the near future, when I mean near future, I mean years to a decade. If your CIMT age shows that you're older than average for your age, you're more likely to have a cardiovascular event in the, in the future. And we can go into specifics about that. I don't really want to do that in this podcast. But in general, if you were, let's say 50 and you've got a cardiovascular age of 65, you're getting much closer to the heart attack than somebody at 50 who has cardiovascular age of 50. And we could do intervention. We send people to a, to a, to the local doctor that works on reversing cardiac age. It's actually very straightforward how you reverse cardiovascular age. It's not going to be screened through, you know, cholesterol and lipids and triglycerides and ldl. Those are not very useful. Tests are good markers that you're going in the right direction if you're treating those, those markers. But it's not a good marker or predictor cardiovascular disease. So cimt, there's one pass that called a Clery C L, E, E, R, L, Y that could be done here in our Detroit area. In Southfield, there's an ascension, they've got a Cleary machine. I think you can actually get it done in virtually any state right now and say advanced CAT scan, not a calcium score. I think that's particularly useful as you're older. It's good for screening young people. But the Clery test is an angiogram of your heart, a special one that'd be kind of like doing hard cath without doing the hard cath. It's just an imaging study. So CIMT is number one for picking up cardiovascular disease. And if your cardiovascular age is older than you, somebody besides your family doctor or cardiologist should be managing that will be typically be a functional medicine cardiologist that really works on reversing cardiovascular disease. Because in general, cardiologists are designed are really out there to treat disease, not to prevent it. So that is a general statement. That's how health care works. And this is not a political opinion. This is health insurance designed to pay for disease, not health number two, cancer. So picking up screening for cancer. Now, there's a handful of screening tests that are covered by insurance. In the 2010 Affordable Health Care act, we mandated screening tests such as colonoscopy, mammogram, mammograms. But this only picks up or has a potential to pick up about one out of four cancers. The other three out of four would be missed with routine screening. And we could do something called a full body mri. Full body mri. MRI is a type of imaging studies where we can pick up a tumor the size of, say, a peanut, which can be excised. So if it's early stage, let's say you had A tumor in your pancreas and it's very tiny. This can be removed, it can be cut out. Whereas if, if you pick it up because you're starting to have symptoms, it's spread too much throughout your body and it's going to likely kill you. So an MRI can be done. You can't just go to a regular hospital and get MRI your full body. They won't, they won't do it. They don't have the mechanism. You have to go to a clinic that does full body mri. Here in Detroit area, we use a bionic mri. They're in Southfield. There's a national company called Pernobo that does this as well. They're not here in Michigan. They can only go in certain states. So you can get a full body MRI in your community or travel somewhere typically between 2 and $3,000. Is the cost of a full body MRI. Going back to the CIMT test I talked about earlier, that's the Cardiovascular, that's about $300. Okay, so full body MRI, there's something called a liquid biopsy. That's a blood test picking up early cancers. It's not quite ready for prime time. That's something you can certainly do, but it's not going to pick up tiny cancers. It's going to pick up more, a little bit more advanced cancer. But you might choose to do that as well. They're about $950. I've heard that Henry Ford of Detroit has them for 650 and I've done that myself. So CIMT about $300. Full body MRI anywhere from 2 to $3,000. Now we have cardiovascular disease and cancer. The next one is neurocognitive decline. So you don't just get Alzheimer's, you get into it. And as your brain ages, it may age faster than your peers or slower than your peers. If your brain is aging faster than people of your age, you will be much more likely to get Alzheimer's or some form of dementia than people of your age. You'll get it earlier and more likely to get it. We can pick this up decades in advance. So there's an MRI imaging, neuro quantitative imaging, they call it. We're using a company here in Michigan, Bionic Imaging. It's like a 300 add on to your to your full body MRI and this gives you basically where is your brain at relative to your peers? I've done this a few times. I've gone to Health Nucleus in San Diego where they give you sort of a brain percentage to your Peers, other places give you a brain age. But basically we're looking at the amount of gray and white matter, which is the substance of your brain and the amount of liquid. Liquid is the cerebral spinal fluid that's surrounding your brain. And you look at the ratio of mass to liquid, more or less, we're looking at the weight of the mass or the mass of the gray and white matter and the amount of liquid. And as your brain ages, the gray and white matter shrinks and liquid expands and we have less gray and white matter and more, more liquid. And you can look at it compared to your peers. If you're at the 50 percentile and for your age, you're about average risk of beginning Alzheimer's, you're at the lower 10 percentile. You got an issue that we need to, need to address. If you're at the upper end of your age, you're really in good shape. Whatever you're doing is genetically and your, your, your habits and your lifestyle are going in your favor. Now if you have, if your brain is more aged than you are, there's definitely interventions that you could do to reverse your brain age. I refer people to the Maxwell Clinic in Nashville. If they're maybe more advanced, if it's just more minor aging, just certain interventions we do. We've seen brain ages go from the worst 10 or 20% to the best 30 or 40% in about one to two years. So that definitely can happen with specific intervention. Again, these are all outside of traditional health care. So your insurance is not going to cover you not dying of something preventable. That's not, that's not the intention of insurance. Health insurance, kind of like your car insurance, it pays for stuff once something happens. So we have to get our heads around that, that you things we do for health aren't going to be covered. In certain cases they are, such as the Affordable Health Care act, mandated coverage of mammograms. Part of that, they were not mandated to be covered. It was like, you know, you could have to do it on your own or pay, pay out of pocket for it, or you might have insurance that had deductible and cover part of it. But if we want to rely on our health insurance to make us healthy, we're really kind of doing ourselves a disservice. And you have to ask yourself, what do you love more? Yourself or your possessions? If you love your possessions more, yeah, you shouldn't be doing these tests. You should buy everything that you can. If you love your health more, we really should spend money on ourselves, taking care of ourselves, and looking out for diseases that are potentially around the corner. And to kind of summarize this, again, I think I'm thinking about really the big three. The big. The big three factors. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, and neurocognitive decline. And they kind of hit us in that order in terms of our age, cardiovascular disease. I mean, in 2025, we should not be waiting to have a heart attack to pick up cardiovascular disease. And most people with heart attacks and strokes didn't know it was coming. We had an easy way to screen for it. You don't have this happen without having had evidence on imaging studies years or decades in advance. So to give you an example, you could be, you know, 50 or 60 years old. Get your CIMT test done. That's an ultrasound, roughly $300. And if your CIMT shows some plaques in your arteries and your cardiac age is a little older than you are, well, now you're armed with information, and we can start digging into why do you have these plaques. And it might be way beyond cholesterol and LDL and APOB and C reactive protein. There's other things that can be looked. Might be uric acid, it might be homocysteine, it might be your A, hemoglobin A1C. These are actually higher predictors of cardiovascular disease than cholesterol or L many. State that again. Uric acid, oxidized APOB, hemoglobin A1C, homa, and homocysteine are all better predictors of cardiovascular disease than the test your doctor is routinely checking for, which is LDL and cholesterol. Those are weak predictors of future cardiovascular events. And I'm not suggesting you start screening for those things. You certainly can. But what I'm saying is that if you do a CIMT and you've got disease, okay, whatever your cholesterol showed you, if that looked like it was doing good, that's maybe not the reason. We need to dig into it further. Doing the full body MRI looking for cancers, if you find a lesion, also looks for things like aneurysms and other lesions. Like, for example, I've done mine a few times. I have a cyst in my liver and it hasn't changed. So I'm not going to do anything about it. It's not cancerous, but I know it's there. And it'll notice other things as well, like some, you know, maybe some arthritis. In general, we're looking for something that's actionable, such as an early tumor or an. Aneurysm now, why can't you just go do this at the hospital? Well, an MRI of a body part takes about an hour. And do your whole body, you'd be in there for eight hours. It costs you probably $30,000. And it's way more sensitivity than you need to screen for cancer. Now, if you have cancer in Oregon, you want to do really specific, high quality mri. But we can actually do an mri. We're taking smaller slices through the body, get it done in an a little bit less, and find tumors that are actual size, let's say again, about size of a peanut that can be removed. So there are only special centers that do this. And it's anywhere again from 2000 to $3000 not covered by insurance. If you're at low risk for cancer, I'm at low risk genetically. I do it every two years. If you're at higher risk, you might do it every year. You can do some blood testing. There's a test called the myriad test that looks at genetic risk factors for cancers. And if you have no risk factors, you decide how often you're going to do that might be every couple years. If you're not a smoker, you don't have a family history, and you don't have this genetic risk factor, every year is probably more often than you need. If you do have risk factors for say pancreatic cancer, maybe you do a more high sensitivity pancreatic test mri. But in general, just doing the full body MRI is a lower quality imaging, looking at the whole body in a short amount of time that picks up small tumors, tumors in the earliest stages. And again, I mentioned briefly there's a blood test called the liquid biopsy, something that I do myself, but I'm not really directly recommending it because it's not, not that sensitive yet. And then there's neurocognitive decline when you get neurocognitive decline where if you live long enough, you have a high probability of that. It's really hard to manage at that point because you're not going to be compliant with anything. But if you're 50, 60, 70, and your brain's a little older than you are, there's specific things you can do to reverse the age of your brain. Your brain is plastic, meaning it does grow. So you have neuroplasticity as the ability for the brain to repair itself. And there's certain things that do that in certain settings where that occurs, or even certain interventions that helps that occur. And if we have, have plaques in our brain that are associated with Alzheimer's, but you don't have Alzheimer's yet. There's ways we can actually extract those through a procedure called plasmapheresis. So there's a lot of options that can be done. If you have earlier cardiovascular disease, a very early tumor, and a very early neurocognitive decline, you know, think about how we approach abnormalities on, say, a colonoscopy. You have a little polyp. A polyp is precancerous. And the gastrologist takes it out, takes it out, and it's gone. And even though that was precancerous and that cancer was tiny and it can turn into cancer, but now it's gone. And they're going to do another one in five years, not next year, in five years, because we know that's how long it takes for tumors to grow. Now, the MRI of the full body does not look at the colon, doesn't really do good with the breast. With the full body, MRI does look at skin cancer, but most solid tumor organs, it does pick up. That is a very easy way to detect it. But there's. We're doing screening for cancer with a handful of tests that pick up about one out of four cancers. You can do screening for other cancers that you don't suspect. Ovarian cancer, bone cancer, pancreas cancer, liver cancer, brain cancer. With a full body mri, pick things up potentially in the earliest stages. And again, cancers grow fairly slow, so we pick up them in an early stage. Now, no prostate cancer for men, there is a psa blood test, which, if in the right setting, that can be very helpful. The standard full body MRI does not pick up prostate cancer very well. Something called a three dimensional MRI for the prostate that you can do looking for prostate cancer. I've done that myself. Unfortunately, it's all clean. You still have to do your mammogram, your colonoscopy, your cat scan of your chest. If you're a smoker, get your skin checked for melanoma. But these are the things you add on to what your insurance covers. And I think it's very important to realize that our health insurance was designed to take care of disease. It does a few preventative things, but in general, taking care of disease, it's up to us to prevent disease. So if you're a smoker, you know, work on quitting smoking. If you're obese, let's get that weight down. If you have diabetes, let's work on diet, nutrition medications as well. If you have cardiovascular disease, you don't know about it yet. Let's, let's work on that. You have an early cancer, let's find it, take it out. If you have neurocognitive changes in your MRI before you have any symptoms whatsoever, I mean, way before you have symptoms, the brain starts shrinking, you feel normal. Our brain has so much extra capacity, let's deal with it in the earliest stages. So for 20, 25, healthy year, there's been a lot of talk about, you know, cleaning up our food supply. People are in these GLP1 agonists to help with their weight and other, other conditions. There's things you can do to prevent yourself from getting dise. Kill most Americans and take us at a point where by the time we figure it out, many cases it's too late to do anything about or leaves us with some kind of disability. You know, you could become a cardiac cripple or have some major problems with cancer or neurocognitive decline and these can be detected in the earliest stages. Again, just reviewing the pricing. CIMT testing for the arteries in the neck is 300. If that's abnormal, we're going to do a study called a Clery study which is 1500, so a little more expensive. You don't need to jump to the Clery, I just do the CIMT first. There is something called a calcium score in a cat scan, about $100. I'm recommending that for people under 40, but over 40 is not quite as helpful as you can't track, you can't see progress with it. So CIMT I believe is the gold standard. Really good standards for what thickness it should be based on race and age and sex. MRI full body for cancer and MRI for neuro, quantitative imaging for brain and that's something I'm doing my round again this year. I did my last full body MRI in November of last year. My last CIMT I did in September of last year and my brain imaging I haven't done three years. So I'm going to do that again. And I've kept my brain age at the 90 percentile from age, which is mean that I'm very, very low likelihood ever to get dementia. My cardiovascular age, I've reversed it by 16 years over the last few years and I've stayed clear of, of any tumors, fortunately. So good. Have a good 20, 25 and thank you very much.