Preventive Tests Everyone Should Be Doing

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Life Force" by Tony Robbins, Peter H. Diamandis, and Robert Hariri. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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What is preventive testing? What preventive tests should you be doing regularly to detect early signs of disease?

Even if you live an extremely healthy lifestyle, diseases can catch you off guard. Preventive testing can help you prevent illnesses or catch them at the early stages when they are most treatable.

Let’s look at these different preventive tests everyone should be doing.

Catching Illnesses Early

In their book Life Force, Tony Robbins, Peter Diamandis, and Robert Hariri recommend several preventive tests, including one for heart disease and one for cancer, and they also recommend testing your hormones and levels of heavy metals in your blood.

The authors recommend you get a coronary computed tomography angiography, or CCTA, a type of heart scan that shows plaque in your arteries. A new method of this testing created by a company called Cleerly uses artificial intelligence to distinguish between types of plaque, some of which are more harmful than others and can be early indicators of heart disease.

(Shortform note: Other tests are being designed that use AI to analyze CCTA scans to predict heart attacks: Researchers at the University of Oxford have created a test that uses heart scans to create a “fingerprint” of the space around your heart that can then be analyzed to identify potential signs of a heart attack. This test can predict heart attacks up to five years before they occur.)

The authors also recommend a yearly full-body MRI combined with a comprehensive blood test to detect cancer, noting that the survival rate for early-detected cancer is nearly 90% while the survival rate for late-detected cancer is just over 20%. The blood test they recommend is called Galleri, developed by a company called GRAIL. Prior to the development of this test, we were only able to detect a few types of cancer before they began causing problems in a patient’s system, but this test can detect more than 50 different types of cancer, and the handful of types it can’t detect—such as brain or kidney cancer—can be detected with a full-body MRI.

(Shortform note: While the Galleri test can often successfully detect cancer, recent data has shown a high rate of false positives for the test. Fewer than half of those who received positive results in 2021 actually had cancer. In the majority of these cases, follow-up tests confirmed a lack of cancer before any treatment began, but about a third of those with false positive results had invasive treatments before it was discovered that they were already cancer-free.)

You should also get your blood tested to assess your hormone levels and the presence of heavy metals in your blood. Testing your hormones annually can help you identify and compensate for irregularities through hormone replacement therapy or hormone optimization therapy.

(Shortform note: You can also help balance your hormones through lifestyle changes. Eating plenty of protein, fiber, and healthy fats, exercising regularly, maintaining a healthy weight, and keeping your stress levels low can all contribute to better hormone levels.)

Hormones are key to numerous bodily functions, but hormone levels begin to drop in early middle age. This negatively impacts your energy levels, your muscle mass, your fertility, your physical appearance, your blood sugar, your body’s inflammatory response, and your ability to concentrate, among many other things.

(Shortform note: Major hormonal changes inconsistent with aging can be an indicator of other conditions such as tumors that form on your hormonal glands, damage to endocrine glands from surgery or illness, or autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto’s disease or Graves’ disease. If you notice a significant shift in your hormones that can’t be explained by aging or other factors, consider speaking to your doctor about other causes.)

Finally, you should test your blood for toxic metals such as mercury, which can cause memory issues, exhaustion, and ultimately death. Fish often contain mercury, and if you have a diet high in fish you may be at increased risk for mercury poisoning.

(Shortform note: The authors mainly discuss mercury poisoning, but other metals that can cause poisoning include lead, arsenic, chromium, aluminum, cobalt, copper, and thallium. Some metals like iron, zinc, and manganese are found naturally in your body and are necessary for its functioning, but they can become toxic if you accumulate too much.)

Preventive Tests Everyone Should Be Doing