#311 - Can Your Blood Predict Your Future Health? | Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray & Mike Haney

From a single blood sample, new proteomic tools can now measure thousands of proteins at once. Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray’s lab is using that flood of data, together with machine learning, to build a much higher-resolution picture of what’s happening throughout the body and where someone’s health may be headed.The early signals are striking. In one analysis of people who appeared healthy by conventional measures, every additional 4.1 years of estimated heart age was associated with nearly 2.5 times the risk of heart failure over the following 15 years. Wyss-Coray sees this kind of measurement eventually becoming a “health compass”: something that could show which parts of the body are changing fastest, then help track whether an intervention is actually moving them in the right direction.Free course: Improve your metabolic healthGet our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠What We Cover:How a drop of blood can now reveal information from thousands of proteinsWhy aging appears to happen in waves rather than at a steady rateWhy one part of the body may age faster than the restWhat young-blood experiments in mice taught Wyss-Coray about proteins and brain agingHow the work is moving from whole organs down to individual cell typesWhy the field’s biggest constraint may now be data collection rather than better AI🎙️ About the Guest:Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray is the D.H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University and director of the Phil and Penny Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience.📍What Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray &amp; Mike Haney discussed:04:03 Proteins 101: the building blocks hiding information about your health05:09 How one blood sample can measure thousands of proteins09:07 Using machine learning to find patterns in the proteome12:17 Can blood reveal what’s happening inside the brain?13:11 What happened when young blood was given to old mice19:45 Why aging may happen in waves rather than at a steady rate29:24 How stable are protein measurements over time?32:37 Can proteins predict disease years before it appears?40:35 Why one part of your body may age faster than the rest46:31 The missing test: does an intervention actually change the measurement?51:04 Going from whole organs to individual cell types54:10 Why more data, not better AI, is the current bottleneck57:18 A future “health compass” for the body🔗 Helpful Links:Organ aging signatures in the plasma proteome track health and disease (Nature, 2023)PaperThe foundational organ-aging work discussed in the episode, using plasma proteins to estimate aging across 11 organs.Plasma proteomic signatures of cellular aging predict human disease (Nature Medicine, 2026)PaperThe newer study extending the approach to more than 40 cell types using over 7,000 plasma proteins.Undulating changes in human plasma proteome profiles across the lifespan (Nature Medicine, 2019)PaperYoung blood reverses age-related impairments in cognitive function and synaptic plasticity in mice (Nature Medicine, 2014)PaperUK Biobank Research resourceThe large longitudinal cohort used for much of the disease-prediction work discussed in the episode.Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/1dfMBAZiP8oFind us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠📲 Connect:Connect with Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray at <a href="https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/tony-wyss-coray