To predict your longevity, you have two main options. You can rely on the routine tests and measurements your doctor likes to order for you, such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels, weight, and so on. Or you can go down a biohacking rabbit hole the way tech millionaire turned longevity guru Bryan Johnson did to live longer. Johnson’s obsessive self-measurement protocol involves tracking more than a hundred biomarkers, ranging from the telomere length in blood cells to the speed of his urine stream (which, at 25 milliliters per second, he reports, is in the 90th percentile of 40-year-olds).
Or perhaps there is a simpler option. The goal of self-measurement is to scrutinize which factors truly predict longevity, so that you can try to change them before it’s too late. A new study from biostatisticians at the University of Colorado, Johns Hopkins University, and several other institutions crunched data from the long-running National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), comparing the predictive power of 15 potential longevity markers. The winner—a better predictor than having diabetes…
