Longevity Metrics

Health and longevity are measurable, quantifiable, and malleable. The first step toward health optimization is awareness. Awareness starts with measuring. Because:

“What gets measured gets managed”

-              Said by many, made famous by Peter Drucker (known for modern management theory)

-              This idea is why I moved from primary care to longevity medicine. More about this at the end.

Welcome to Season 6 of Full Scope! This season is all about how to measure health and longevity. We are going to go over:

-              All of the tests utilized at Longetrics to measure health and longevity in Your Longevity Report Card

-              Videos of how to perform each test (https://www.youtube.com/@BillBrandenburgMD)

-              A podcast and a blog about what each of these tests (the longevity metrics) means regarding a person’s health and longevity (+ some tips about how to improve them).

Saddle Up!

Definitions

Longevity = Long existence or service

Human Longevity = living longer, living healthier, being more useful

Metrics = The science of measuring as applied to a specific field of study

Some longevity metrics can be measured at home with no or minimal equipment. Some require complex machines. Some metrics can be interpreted easily. Others, may require a physician to fully understand. My hope is that this content will help people monitor their health more diligently and accurately. Additionally, I hope this content will be useful to other healthcare provider looking to measure longevity metrics in their patients.

Understanding data, even with your favorite LLM can be challenging. So, if you need help, consider investing in a comprehensive, longevity-focussed, health screening at Longetrics or with another trusted organization/provider. COI – I own and operate Longetrics.

Where Longevity Metrics Come From

-              things we can measure that are correlated with health, longevity, and aging including:

-              metrics that are known to change with age (not always because of disease)……unless aging is a disease???

-              Metrics based on observational research studies that look at how biomarkers and the presence of disease correlate with death.

-              Metrics I see breaking down as people increase in age and suffer an increasing burden of chronic disease (as a hospitalist, I get a tremendous amount of exposure to this)

Examples of Longevity Metrics that Will Be Covered

-              Sensory: vision, hearing, smell, touch

-              Cardiorespiratory fitness, VO2 Max, HR Recover

-              Strength, power, and balance

-              Body composition: muscle, fat, bone

-              Cognition (Brain Function)

-              Laboratory Studies, e.g. CBC, B12, CRP and more

-              Retinal Scans

-              Echocardiograms

-              Carotid ultrasound

-              And so much more. Im going to basically cover every test currently utilized at Longetrics.

Why Learn about Longevity Metrics

-              To better understand your health and how you are aging. Awareness is the first step!

-              So you can focus on improving the longevity metrics that matter most for your health (points of maximal leverage). Smallest amount of work for maximal benefit and address underlying/root causes of health problems.

-              To help the people around you be more healthy and understand their health

-              Because regular measuring will improve long term management

-              As humans, we should understand the human machine and how to better optimize it. You only get one body and it is the greatest asset you will ever receive.

How Longevity Metrics Led Me from Primary Care to Longevity Medicine

-              As a PCP, I would ask people. How is your health? How is your fitness? How strong are you? What is your diet like?

-              What I found: Patient answers are not very reliable. I believe most patients answer honestly, but their perception is off. Denial and distortion are things that all of us utilize to protect ourselves from objective reality.

-              So, in addition to asking, I started measuring. What I found was that the numbers were often very different than peoples answers to questions.

-              As I measured more and more things, I noticed that measuring was not only diagnostic, it was also therapeutic. This is because when people become aware of a problem, they cant help but start to address said problem.

-              Over time, the value of measuring health using longevity metrics became more and more apparent. At the same time, the routine health screenings performed in primary care seemed increasingly inadequate (only 2.5% of healthcare dollars spent in the USA go toward prevention)

-              As such, I have now shifted my practice entirely to comprehensive, longevity-focused, health screenings.

-              I believe that all of us would benefit from regular comprehensive health screenings.

-              Such screenings help patients understand their health better, help other physicians provide better care, make disease prediction and prevention possible, and often elucidate the underlying reasons/root causes for health issues.

So, I hope you enjoy season 6. We are going to kick this chapter off with the first longevity metric next week, visual acuity.

Conflict of Interest: I provide comprehensive health screenings and am positioned to financially benefit from increasing use of preventative health screenings and services. But, so do you.

Thanks for reading/listening,

Bill Brandenburg, MD