You can bet at least some of them are thinking about this too
It's my presumption that these services are expensive now but once proven will become commodity. In sufficient time it would be as cheap/free as penicillin or a multivitamin.
If you had a large country like china or the us or some other big baller walk in and say, "make 5,000 MRIs to these specs and we'll buy them" then by the end that manufacturer could quite possibly crank out another 5,000 for comparative pennies and flood the market, but until someone puts a few billion on the line it's not going to happen.
First, advanced blood testing can cost <$200. Get ApoB and Lp(a) for heart health. hs-CRP for inflammation, A1c for diabetes, eGFR for kidney health, etc. https://www.empirical.health/product/comprehensive-health-pa...
Then, determine your nutrition goals based on your blood test results. For example, if your ApoB / LDL cholesterol is high, focus on getting more fiber and less saturated fat. If blood pressure is high, focus on potassium and sodium.
Exercise & sleep - use an Apple Watch or similar to track VO2Max and sleep stages.
MRI - I'd probably skip the MRI for cancer screening. While I think this will be the future, the evidence base is just not strong enough today to know what to do with the results. You can do a FIT-based colon cancer screen at home for <$10 (colon cancer is affecting people at younger and younger ages). Mammography and cervical cancer testing in a regular doctor appointment.
CAC scan (assessing calcium buildup in the arteries) - do if ApoB is high. You can book these for $200.
VO2Max is based on GPS and heart rate sensor measurements, processed by a deep learning algorithm that uses physiological ODEs (ordinary differential equations). Very cool algorithm.
Apple Watch sleep stages (and sleep apnea detection) is based only on 3D accelerometer data.
Do you suffer from a health condition that requires monitoring O2sat?
It amuses me that Apple will block that EU mandated store stuff if you move a EUnphone to the US after a few weeks (at least I understand that to be the case) but doesn't do the same for this feature.
It is not related to your blood oxygen level.
It seems likely that one way or another it'll be resolved-- either by overturning the ruling in Apple's favor or Apple just gives Massimo a bunch of money-- and then it will come back.
* Eat anti-inflammatory foods (e.g., blueberries) or use cooking techniques that produce fewer PAHs (e.g., braising or steaming rather than sauteing or broiling)
* Drink less alcohol
* Medications (e.g., statins and GLP-1s also have anti-inflammatory benefits)
Early detection of cancer and CVD are great but fairly standard anyway if you just follow recommendations that already exist.
Getting sufficient potassium (lowers blood pressure) and not too much salt (raises blood pressure) does take deliberate effort. Those with high blood pressure need about 3500mg of potassium per day (about 8 bananas) and <1500mg of sodium; this applies during the whole day, not just during exercise.
VO2Max can be helpful for guiding the type of exercise at any given point in the fitness journey. People starting out benefit a lot from low intensity cardio (zone 2), but at some point, their VO2Max will plateau, which is a good sign to start layering in zone 5 or interval training.
People who are very dedicated to health can achieve all goals simultaneously, but for the average person, I think measuring your biomarkers and then choosing where to expend limited effort is a good approach.
Even if I do not live a single year longer, improving the quality of those years is of value to me. There might even be some calculus underwhich its actually desirable to live a _shorter_ life but with far higher quality. Right now it sounds appealing to me if someone said "You'll only live to 85" (about a 2 year expected loss), "but you'll have the health of a 18-25 year old male for the entire time" ...
And if it does enable longevity... Society has a lot of catching up to do, and a lot of ripple challenges to effect. Things like what happens when someone who looks 25 is actually 55? Who should they socially acceptably date? (~25 year olds? ~55 year olds who look 25? ~55 year olds who look 55?)
What happens when your voter base has internalized values from far in the past? If we make someone live to 120, then we need to contend with values lasting for ~120 years, rather than dying off and being refreshed sooner.
Genuinely, who cares about sci-fi questions like this?
Why aren't you worrying about how fairly matching four-armed martial artists against two armed? Answer: because it's so unlikely to happen, it's not worth it. We're not getting 55 year olds with the body of a 25 year old, we're getting slim 55 year olds wearing make up and taking TRT. That's not youth! It's a dumb facsimile.
I don't know man. There are already plenty of 55 year olds dating 25 year olds right now regardless of looks. Also, not as extreme, but looking like you're in your 30s throughout most of your later adult life is not that uncommon nor difficult. Barring any health issues, that's where most people's looks stabilize.
One point stood out, though, when they started talking about evolutionary roots of things like facial fat pad thinning with age. That was this: historically, it was never important for humans to live beyond middle age because as soon as it stopped being possible to procreate, the job was done. With advances in technology having unlocked new methods of food production & preparation, safer shelters, better healthcare and more sophisticated information storing, retrieval and sharing, people are living far beyond their fertile years now, and this extension of both healthspan & lifespan is impacting how people are considering their approaches to healthcare (and crucially, lifestyle).
There's only so many MRI machines in the world, staff to operate them, and radiologists to interpret the images. A limited study like an MRI of the brain might take a few minutes to read, but a whole body would take much longer. You may even want subspeciality doctors to read individual body parts (e.g. neuro, MSK) which would cost more and take longer.
There's also the risk of finding something benign then putting the patient through treatment and surgery for something that wasn't harming them.
If we could somehow have inexpensive scanners and an inexpensive way to interpret the resulting images - then yes, we should expand access to MRIs as they're a generally safe way to screen for abnormalities.
AI interpretation could lower the cost of reading the images, but a lot of the expense is in the hugely complex scanner which requires liquid helium, etc. and the technologists to schedule and operate it.
Lack of staff to analyze the results is a problem, but not a huge one. Simply having a baseline to compare for later scans is valuable by itself, without any detailed analysis of the original.
randycupertino•3h ago
rafaelreinert•3h ago