You Don't Need to Obsess Over Frequent Blood Tests to Get Healthier and Live Longer
Michael Houtz
Earlier this month, you might have caught headlines about high-end gym chain Equinox’s new $40,000 membership program, which includes customized training and nutrition protocols created based on frequent blood tests. While the program, called EQX Optimize, is brand new, the announcement was just the latest fast-moving wellness trend. The concept of routinely testing and subsequently optimizing your blood biomarkers in pursuit of a healthier, longer life has been steadily making its way into the mainstream, thanks to a growing set of direct-to-consumer companies like InsideTracker, Lifeforce, and Function. (That last one handles the back end of the Equinox program.)
The sell is that, by testing your blood as frequently as every three to six months, you can extend your lifespan through a combination of nudging your blood biomarkers into their optimal ranges and catching red flags early. A representative for Inside Tracker told GQ that “people often don’t receive interventions from their doctors until a problem is already too far down the line.” Function declares on its website that the company's focus is on helping members live 100 healthy years, while a scrolling marquee on its homepage parades a lengthy list of conditions like pancreatic cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and leukemia—each presumably among the thousands of diseases the company claims it can help members detect early.
In addition to displaying quantified results for upwards of 40 biomarkers grouped into categories like fitness, metabolism, and hormones, many of these companies also display your body’s biological age—based on their own proprietary calculations, of course.
But how necessary (and accurate) are these tests really, especially if you’re already getting bloodwork done at your annual, insurance-covered physical? We asked the experts. Their advice: Don’t be too quick to the draw.
How often do you really need to get your blood tested?
At a normal annual physical—which you really do need to do—your doctor will run a panel of blood tests. These new tests aren't that. While some of these companies run their samples through the same labs that your primary doctor might use, such as Quest Diagnostics, they’re ultimately not operating under the same guidelines as traditional medical practices.
“Routine bloodwork is not a thing,” says Jeffrey A. Linder, MD, MPH, Professor and Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “There is no medical specialty society that says you should get checked for all of the blood tests on any basis whatsoever.”
“This is like when everybody was talking about full-body MRI scans,” Dr. Linder says, referring to last year’s spike in interest around elective full-body imaging after Kim Kardashian posted about Prenuvo. “Now all of a sudden everybody's talking about blood tests.”
Dr. Linder says (and all of the doctors we asked agreed) that once a year is plenty, unless there is cause to investigate a specific symptom or concern.
“It's an easy benchmark,” says Nathan R. Starke, MD, Director of the Men’s Health Center at Houston Methodist. “Typically with health insurance it’s totally free to you to go get your blood checked once a year. Is it always necessary? Maybe not, but I wouldn't say more frequent is necessary.”
Are there any downsides to regular blood testing?
“For somebody that's getting data back every three months, that might drive you crazy,” says James White, PhD, Assistant Professor and Senior Fellow in the Center for the Study of Aging at Duke University School of Medicine.
“There's always some little something” to be improved, says Dr. Starke. And that’s if you ignore the fact that there’s variability within your own biomarkers, so levels can (and do) move around from one day to the next, and the “optimal” biomarker ranges used by these start-ups are not necessarily optimal for you but rather based on whatever data sets their models are built on.
Ironically, stressing about perfecting your biomarkers and reducing your biological age could actually have the reverse effect. In a 2023 research paper investigating factors that contribute to biological aging, White and his fellow researchers observed "a clear pattern” showing “that exposure to stress increased biological age.”
This holds true with regard to routinely nitpicking over regular blood test results. “If you get a test that says you're aging faster, that would be a huge mental setback to somebody who is in good health. That's a major stressor,” White says, “which then of course is a major factor to accelerate it more.”
Another consideration would be false positives, which occur regularly across the medical diagnostic spectrum and could send you down what Dr. Linder calls “a path toward some kind of medical misadventure.”
“When you find something wrong based on no symptoms, the probability is much higher that it's just a false positive than it actually represents something bad going on that you caught early, he says.
While a false positive can be ruled out with additional testing, a concerning blood test result leaves you with a choice: drop another couple hundred bucks to re-test (Function and InsideTracker offer a la carte re-testing packages for additional fees), or take the result at face value, which usually means additional, increasingly invasive kinds of testing such as imaging or biopsies that come with their own risks.
“At some point even putting a needle in stuff is dangerous,” says Dr. Linder. “In the end, we've made you extremely anxious, we've wasted your time, we've exposed you to medical danger, and we've actually not improved your health at all. In fact, we've probably made it worse.”
What's the likelihood that regular blood testing could expose a critical health issue?
These tests aren’t just appealing to biohackers bent on optimizing every milligram of their existence; they’re also aimed at those simply trying to avoid life-changing conditions. “You think you’re healthy. It’s time to make sure,” reads the header at the top of Lifeforce’s site.
In reality, if you think you’re healthy, you probably are. “Your body is pretty good at letting you know if something's off,” says White. “It’s very rare that you feel fantastic and somebody's like, ‘Wow, you have a major disease.’”
Still, it’s only human to worry about the possibility of something lurking beneath the surface, especially when brands boost anecdotal outliers in their advertisements. “The ones who find stuff will be the ones to tell the world about it,” says Dr. Starke. “Statistically, though, the likelihood you’ll find some crazy cancer that you had no idea was in there? Pretty damn low.”
The verdict seems to be that these kinds of blood tests should be done (if at all) in the spirit of curiosity without putting too much stock in the results. “Of course everybody wants to brag that their exercise intervention and healthy diet is doing well. But we don't know enough about how sensitive these tests are,” says White. “So I would say to take them just kind of for fun, so to speak.”
On the other hand, if giving blood doesn't sound like your idea of fun, feel free to opt out. “I just feel like people are wasting a lot of their time and a lot of their mental energy for not very much of anything,” says Dr. Linder.
Originally Appeared on GQ
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