My 2024 Health and Longevity Testing Protocol
After years of experimentation, I’ve settled on this protocol for measuring what matters in 2024.
“You cannot accomplish something serious in martial arts if you do not become serious inside of yourself.” — SHI HENG YI
It was in 2006 that I was first introduced to the idea of “radical life extension” while reading through Ray Kurzweil’s greatest hits. I came across his book, The Singularity is Near, which best describes the inevitable outcome of compounding technology. I followed up by reading his lesser-known but much more actionable book, Fantastic Voyage — the science of radical life extension.
The predictions in those two books are that the rate of increasing technological capacity will eclipse a human mind’s ability to comprehend it, and that life extension technologies will make aging optional — both happening within my lifetime. I’ve never viewed these things through a moral lens, although it’s common for people to have strong beliefs around this (either pro-natural-order-of-things or pro-tech-utopia). My view has been more matter-of-fact: technology is a compounding process, and biology has no hard limit on organism lifespan.
Nowadays, as the predicted technological compounding is coming to pass, AI and longevity are all the buzz. The idea of the singularity is not yet mainstream, but it will be.
Longevity and Health: Two Sides of the Same Coin
There is a dichotomy in many people’s reactions to “I’m working on improving my health” and “I’m working on extending my lifespan” (or worse, “I’m working on living forever”). It’s important to understand that, at least for now, health and longevity are the same project. Healthy people live longer. I consider the words health and longevity as effectively synonyms. Working on one is the same as working on the other, and vice versa.
Over the last 18 years, I’ve taken an on-again, off-again approach to health and longevity. Like many people, I’m lured by behaviors and habits that are unhealthy, facilitate disease, and decrease lifespan. I’ve fallen off the wagon more than a few times, sometimes because a new health trend has caught my attention, sometimes because I’m tired of being out of shape, and sometimes because I want to be a model for the next chiseled Greek statue.
But also, without fail, a quiet voice from 2006 reminds me that my option to transform health into longevity vests in the 2040s — and I should make sure I have enough health in the bank to make the swap (if I want to).
Measurement is Not Optional
In any endeavor, if you’re not tracking metrics, you’re just messing around. Don’t get me wrong — messing around is great. It’s fun, not everything is about progress, and you can even sometimes make accidental progress. Up until last year, my health and longevity endeavors were solidly in the messing around category. I did a whole lot of protocols but tracked zero metrics. I had no evidence that what I did or did not do was working. (Okay, that’s not entirely true; I sometimes tracked things like my weight or progression in the gym, which have some correlation to health, but it was ad hoc and sporadic).
Last year, I started putting together my health and longevity test suite so I could transition from messing around to doing things that moved the needles that matter.
My 2024 Q2 Health and Longevity Test Suite
The ideal test suite is stack-ranked by ROI, where the return on a test is its ability to surface the highest ROI protocols. My test suite this year is a bit larger than last year. There is a lot more to look into, add, and occasionally remove tests that are just noise.
Ideal tests have these two important properties:
- Predictive of longevity (so that you know it’s meaningful)
- Modifiable with interventions (so that you know it’s actionable)
It is still an ongoing project for me to get good details on the properties of these tests and stack-rank them. But here are my current ones for 2024 Q2:
- DunedinPace Rate of Aging Test: I believe this test currently has the highest correlation with future morbidity and mortality, along with excellent response to actionable interventions. It is the gold standard for most longevity practitioners. More details on this here. This year I used https://shop.trudiagnostic.com/products/truage-pace. Last year I used https://novoslabs.com/product/novos-age/.
- Comprehensive Blood Panel: I used https://www.insidetracker.com/ last year and this year.
- VO2 Max: I did this for the first time this year at a local shop. It’s brutal but provides great data to have.
- DEXA Scan: I did this for the first time this year at a local shop. It gives a detailed body composition report and bone density scores.
- Gut and Microbiome: I used https://www.viome.com/products/full-body-intelligence. They use very cool AI-leveraged data analysis, but they have minimal historical use to back it up.
Wrap-up
I think some version of all of the above should be part of a standard annual checkup. If you want to shorten your iteration cycle as much as possible, they can be done as frequently as quarterly.
I’m still trying to dial in what protocols work best for me, so I plan to do a full retest in 6 months. I just completed this test suite last week, and it will probably take 6–8 weeks to get results from all of them. I will likely write a report at that time and document goals and protocols for the next 6 months.
Follow along here, or at miahwilde.com, for further updates, protocols and resources on health and prosperity.
Be well and die later,
Miah
— Further Reading and Resources —
Rejuvenation Olympics
- If you’re going to adopt someone else’s longevity protocols make sure that what they are doing is at least working for them.
- https://rejuvenationolympics.com/
Bryan Johnson
- The most measured (and possibly most controversial) human in history.
- Love him or hate him but he’s the leader in publicizing his metrics and protocols.
- https://protocol.bryanjohnson.com/
Lifespan by David Sinclaire
- The book that began to popularize the notion of longevity.
- https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont-Have/dp/1501191977
Outlive by Peter Attia
- The book that solidified the popularity of longevity.
- https://peterattiamd.com/outlive/
