(BPT) - Do you know how well you're aging? Aging well goes beyond how you look. To live a healthier, more active lifestyle as you age, it's important to know your current health baseline and identify potential future issues that you can prevent or manage now.
As we hit the home stretch of 2024, get a jump on next year's resolutions and be your own health advocate. Create a personalized healthy aging plan with the help of next gen services, like genetic sequencing, and knowing your body's 'true' biological age.
Don't know where to start? Here are five proactive steps you can take to invest in your health and longevity.
1. Find your baseline
While knowing your family medical history is a great place to start, you'll need more information to determine your baseline health.
Consider signing up for 23andMe's Total HealthTM, a longevity platform that combines genetic testing, blood biomarker testing, Biological Age analysis, and expert clinician oversight.
Total Health provides advanced, clinician-ordered genetic testing called exome sequencing that evaluates high impact genes associated with health conditions that, if detected early, may have effective preventive measures and clinical interventions.
Nothing is more personalized than your genetics, and genetic screening really is for everyone (not just for a specific group of people), especially with the amount of information current testing provides. Genetics is a true foundation of health, and the information gleaned from your DNA can offer a lifetime's worth of insights into your longevity.
2. Go beyond routine lab tests
Once you have genetics as a baseline, you can layer on more data to get a fuller picture of your health profile.
Traditional blood testing does provide important health information. However, frequent comprehensive blood tests can offer ongoing insight into prevention and early detection. In fact, 70% of clinical decisions rely on lab data - that's why blood testing is so fundamental.1
A comprehensive test can measure things like blood sugar levels, kidney, liver and thyroid function, along with cholesterol and advanced lipoprotein levels. This is especially important if you have a family history of cardiovascular diseases.
Knowing your cholesterol level is just part of the story. When you have a comprehensive blood test, you can find out your lipoprotein(a) (Lp(a)) and Apolipoprotein B (ApoB) levels. High levels of Lp(a) and APOB are associated with an increased risk of heart and blood vessel disease, including heart attacks and stroke.
If you have high levels of either (or both) markers, your health care provider can recommend treatments and lifestyle changes that can help you manage these levels and reduce your risk of related conditions.
Having both genetic and blood biomarker data together is key to constructing your health baseline. Together, they can help you identify screening, treatments and lifestyle changes that promote longevity and build long-term resilience.
3. Combine your genetic results with your bloodwork and take action
Genetics is about future risk. Lab tests are about the now.
Having both genetic and blood biomarker data together is key. Your genetic data gives you deep insights into your potential future risks, while your biomarker data gives you insight into the now. And together they could help provide you with answers.
For example, if you have high cholesterol today, you might be wondering why. Is it your daily habits, or is there more to it? Your genetics could help piece it all together and provide insight into why you may have higher cholesterol beyond your lifestyle habits. In fact, you might have a higher likelihood based on your own genetics! And you might need personalized interventions.
Your genetic test results can also guide you toward concrete steps to prevent disease related to a genetic variant. Genetics can provide insights on potential serious health risks for hereditary cardiovascular disease, neurological disease, and different types of cancers - risks you may not know otherwise. Take, for example, a variant in the MLH1 gene that causes Lynch syndrome.
Lynch syndrome affects about 1 in 280 people and can have serious health consequences. Individuals with Lynch syndrome are at a greater risk of colorectal, endometrial, ovarian and certain other cancers than the general population.
If your genetic results indicate you have Lynch syndrome, you can take proactive steps to manage your cancer risks. For example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that people with Lynch syndrome should have colonoscopes starting at age 20-25 (instead of waiting until age 45) and continue to get screened every 1-2 years. Earlier, more frequent screening can catch the disease at the beginning stages when it's most treatable.
4. Make lifestyle changes to lower your biological age
Your age is just a number. It doesn't tell you how your body is truly aging. That's why it's critical to find out your biological age number and potentially lower or maintain your biological age.
23andMe's Total Health membership includes access to a new Biological Age feature. This feature can help tell you how old you really are from the inside by analyzing biomarkers that reflect the condition of major body systems and organs and how it may differ from your calendar age. This measure is checked biannually so you can track it and take steps to potentially slow down or even reverse course if your biological age is outpacing your calendar age.
5. Make a tailored health plan with a clinician who understands genetics
All of this sophisticated health data is only helpful if you know what to do with it. Once you have your genetic and blood work results, it's a good idea to work with a clinician to create a tailored health plan that includes lifestyle, screening and other health management tools.
If, for example, you have high cholesterol and elevated Lp(a) levels, a clinician can help you take concrete steps to lower your risk of cardiovascular disease. They might discuss the benefits of statins and how your genetic results can be used to inform what your doctor prescribes to help reduce the risk of side effects.
Finding a clinician may sound daunting, but if you have a Total Health membership, you'll have unlimited direct access to expert clinicians who have unique training in genetics. They can help connect all of the dots and build a hyper-personalized health plan that focuses on ongoing disease prevention and early detection.
Don't address health issues as they come along. Get ahead of possible health risks to increase your odds of aging better with these proactive steps. To learn more about genetics, blood testing and personalized care, visit 23andMe.com/Total-Health.