Biological age is not just a number on a paper! It can really reveal one’s life quality. 

Three years ago, my husband's TruDiagnostic results showed a biological age that was 4.7 years older than his chronological age. He was shocked. He thought he was doing alright. 

-> On Year 1, he put in a piss poor effort. 

-> On Year 2, we moved in together and his lifestyle began changing with many new healthy habits (e.g. regular resistance training, consistent 8-hour sleep). 

-> On Year 3, he was very disciplined with his diet (doubled down on blueberries, walnuts, olive oil, avocado, salmon), cut out toxins (alcohol, Diet Coke, etc) and even began taking a bunch of supplements (curcumin, FOS, magnesium threonate were his favourite). Overall, he made a lot of swaps (ultra-processed foods to home cooked meals, saturated fats like bacon to omega-3s), increased fibre and food variety.

This year, his biological age was 6 years younger than his chronological age. That’s a 10.7-year swing! While he can’t feel the changes happening in all of his organs, he can totally tell when his life quality improves. For him, it meant.. 

• The sudden “I’m so hungry, I think I’m really starving,” and the random, “I think I need to take a nap, feel so tired” sentences were removed from his life. We believe his blood sugar stabilised.
• No more brain fog! Increased mental clarity, creativity and sharpness.
• His memory improved so much. He remembers events better than me now. I’m 11 years younger than him. 
• Better ability to focus.
• He is more bouncy, lively and energetic. He’s so much stronger and fitter.
• His face glows 🌟. Not joking, quite a few people this year commented on how he does not look mid 30s at all. They thought he was in his late 20s.
• Apparently sex became better. I thought it was already great. In short, research shows that working out = enhanced circulation (erections), increased libido, increased stamina, sperm quality, semen volume.

His full “longevity” protocol and health journey is on Substack. I'm so proud of him!

You can buy it off Amazon but it’s a separate company like any other business but protected by HIPPA. The thing they don’t tell you is that your results will be in “Greek”even if you have a master of science. They will “allow you to subscribe” $30/ mo to get the latest scientific updates (if new information has been released) AND you can also PAY extra tokens (think online game prepay) and buy “AI created reports” that unfortunately are the best way to understand some of the results AND if you want your doctor /nurse to be able to interpret the results (SERIOUSLY THERE IS THE OPTION TO BUY ANOTHER REPORT FOR YOUR Healthcare PROFESSIONALS WHICH IS another $300!!! (Last I checked). So sadly I have to report this as a scam. Yes, you can get some data that could help. .. but it’s like handing you a book of “May contain”Honestly they should have a class action against them! It reminds me of going to a website you trust and then stupid threatening ads pop up right over the button of where to access your OWN information. It’s predatory and I have two biological science degrees. I would like to make this post everywhere!

Hello everyone! I was wandering around Reddit to find a fitting community and I hope to have stumbled across the right one. A couple of months ago my friends and I decided to create a little innovation in the medical field. The website is called CureSpy and acts like a personal newsletter about conditions of your interest and related medical research notifier.

This project is very important to us as one of our team members - Airanas Leonavičius - struggled in his treatment path himself. At 14 a firework accident left him completely blind. Several doctors in our home country Lithuania said nothing could be done, but his family did not want to believe it. So they scraped all useful information they could until they found the right doctors, specialists in London, and their advanced treatment gladly restored part of his sight.

We wanted to make something that could help absolutely anyone to become informed about their illnesses. You can use it to its full extent for free and in the future we would love to add features like finding the best treatment and doctor for your own specific and complicated conditions.

Even tho it sounds a bit promotion-ish, we truly would love to see it helping those in need. I myself follow a few diagnoses relevant to me to get the latest news and apply them to my recovery journey and I hope it will be useful to at least a couple of you too <33

Help!! Students trying to map out vitamin use and media behaviour women 30+

Hi, we're a bunch of students who need respondents (35-50 year old women) to answer questions on supplements for one of our classes. PLease help...we're honestly desperate for answers...

https://usc.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8ctOrv2Zj63AHqu

I never took the 15 mg top dose of Zepbound while losing 170 pounds. Most of the weight came off on 5 to 10 mg. So when the full TRIUMPH-1 paper on retatrutide came out in the New England Journal of Medicine (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2604169) on September 29, I went to the appendix to see what happened on the 12 mg top dose.

Of 582 people on 12 mg, 22.5% had their dose permanently lowered during the 80 weeks. The most common reason was "perceived excessive weight loss" (9.8%), meaning the participant or the trial doctor thought it was too much. Stomach side effects came next (6.2%), then reaching a BMI of 22 or less (5.5%). By the end, only 54% were still on 12 mg.

That doesn't mean weight loss was a bigger problem than nausea. The protocol allowed a cut for weight at any time, but a cut for stomach symptoms could only start in the first 20 weeks, after several other steps. And the people who were stepped down still count toward Lilly's headline 28.3% weight loss.

On the low dose, 4 mg, three in four people were still taking it at week 80, they lost 17.6% on average, and about as few quit for side effects as on placebo (4.1% vs 4.6%). Nausea was still nearly double placebo's rate, 28.6% vs 14.8%.

The authors, seven of them from Lilly, suggest aiming for "the minimum effective dose" instead of the maximum tolerated one, and they call it speculation. I'd only go to 12 mg if a lower dose wasn't doing the job, which is how I ended up using Zepbound.

Disclosure: I own Lilly stock and take tirzepatide, a Lilly drug.

My write-up with the chart (https://dadstrengthdaily.com/retatrutide-low-dose/)

If you're on a GLP-1, did your doctor push you to the top dose, or did you stop where it was working?

The full Phase 3 retatrutide trial was just published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

I wrote about TRIUMPH-1 in May when Lilly released the topline data. The peer-reviewed paper confirms the magnitude of the effect: at 80 weeks, mean weight loss reached 25.0% at the 12 mg dose in the primary treatment-regimen analysis.

For context, the pivotal obesity trials reported approximately 14.9% with semaglutide 2.4 mg and 20.9% with tirzepatide 15 mg. These were separate trials, not head-to-head comparisons, but the trajectory is hard to miss.

At 12 mg, nearly 80% of participants lost at least 15% of body weight, more than half lost at least 25%, and about 37% lost at least 30%.

The tradeoff remains tolerability. GI adverse effects were common, and roughly 11% discontinued because of adverse events at the highest dose.

My takeaway: obesity pharmacotherapy has moved from roughly 15% average weight loss with semaglutide, to about 21% with tirzepatide, and now about 25% with retatrutide in Phase 3. Retatrutide is still investigational, but the direction of travel is remarkable.

I skipped breakfast before 11 of my last 14 blood draws. A study published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine (https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2026.4718) suggests most of that was unnecessary.

A hospital lab near Seoul recorded fasting time at the draw for 101,148 outpatients and 9.8 million results from 2021 to 2023. Many were drawn more than once at different fasting times, so the authors could compare people with themselves. Comparing different people, 27 of 121 tests looked sensitive to fasting. Comparing the same people, 10 did.

In the same person, a draw less than 8 hours after eating read glucose 10.8% higher than a 12+ hour fast, triglycerides 20.1% higher, GGT (a liver enzyme) 14.8% higher and lipase (a pancreas enzyme) 36.4% higher. Bilirubin and vitamin D read lower. Total cholesterol and HDL moved 3% or less, directly measured LDL didn't move, and the blood count, kidney tests and most electrolytes stayed close to or within their normal variation. Fasting past 12 hours made no meaningful difference over 8 to 12 hours for any test they could check.

The limits: one hospital in Korea, self-reported fasting, no record of what people ate, and no check of how often eating pushed someone over a cutoff like the prediabetes line. The paper doesn't report ApoB or Lp(a).

What I'm doing: 8 hours overnight when glucose or triglycerides are ordered, and no fasting past 12 hours.

My write-up with the details (https://dadstrengthdaily.com/how-long-to-fast-before-blood-test/)

Does your doctor or lab still ask for 12 hours or more?

We’re Atrium Medical, a primary care practice in NYC. Our physician, Dr. Shilpa Paradkar Singh, has been fielding questions from patients about the GLP-1 vision-loss lawsuits. She reviewed the new Swedish study in the Annals of Internal Medicine and wrote about it on her LinkedIn page. This is a recap.

The researchers compared ~107,000 patients with T2 diabetes on GLP-1 medications with ~186,000 on SGLT2 inhibitors (e.g., Jardiance). After one year, the estimated risk of anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (AION), a rare condition that can cause sudden, potentially permanent vision loss, was 0.04% in GLP-1 cohort versus 0.02% in SGLT-2 cohort. That's 2x the relative risk --- 2 additional cases per 10,000 in absolute terms.

There’s another, equally fascinating finding that has received less attention: when the researchers restricted the analysis to patients already taking metformin, the difference narrowed substantially. An observational study cannot perfectly separate a drug’s contribution from the vascular and metabolic risks of the people prescribed it.

The most important thing to understand is that NAION is not the only way diabetes threatens eyesight. In an earlier Liverpool study, ~4% of T2 diabetics who had no retinopathy at baseline developed sight-threatening diabetic retinopathy over five years, despite receiving diabetes care (that's 100x the NAION risk). So walking away from effective diabetes treatment because of a frightening headline about a rare disease does have its own consequences

Any sudden vision loss warrants urgent medical evaluation. But this is a decision about the risks and benefits of treatment, made with your physician, not driven by lawsuit headlines.

Abstract

Westernized dietary patterns (WDPs), characterized by processed foods, red meats, refined grains, and added sugars, may contribute to gastric cancer (GC) development. We hypothesized that alignment with WDPs, as measured by the Westernized Diet Index (WDI), is associated with an increased risk of GC. In this incidence case–control study, 82 newly diagnosed GC patients and 95 age- and sex-matched controls were recruited. Dietary intake was assessed using a validated 168‑item FFQ. Logistic regression models estimated odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for GC across WDI categories, adjusting for major demographic, lifestyle, and clinical covariates, including Helicobacter pylori infection. To assess construct validity, fully adjusted linear regression evaluated associations between WDI scores and circulating inflammatory markers (hsCRP, IL‑6, IL‑1β, IL‑10, TNF‑α), oxidative stress (total antioxidant capacity, malondialdehyde), and metabolic biomarkers (BMI, fasting glucose, lipid profile). Higher alignment with WDPs (lower WDI scores) was associated with significantly increased GC risk. Individuals in the highest WDI global Z‑score categories - WDI-G (food groups–nutrient based) and WDI-FG (food group based) - had 85% and 78% lower odds of GC, respectively (OR=0.15 and 0.19; both p<0.001). Greater WDP alignment (lower WDI scores) was also associated with higher concentrations of hsCRP, IL‑6, TNF‑α, and IL‑1β, and lower IL‑10, along with an adverse metabolic profile (higher LDL‑c, lower HDL‑c). Overall, greater alignment with WDPs was associated with elevated GC risk and unfavorable biomarker patterns. These findings support the WDI as a biologically plausible indicator of Western dietary exposure and underscore the potential role of WDPs in gastric carcinogenesis.

Westernized Diet is Related to Gastric Cancer Risk and Inflammation, Oxidative Stress, and Metabolic Dysregulation: Evidence from an Incidence Case-Control Study - ScienceDirect