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The Miami blood test
Dana White did not want to meet Gary Brecka, though a friend named Gary Kasem kept pushing it. Then his son turned 21 and held his birthday in Miami, where Brecka lives. Brecka offered to run IVs for the group, and one day he offered to take blood and run the lab work.
Brecka had a method for predicting when a person would die, and the idea took hold of the man whose blood he was testing. His estimate for this one was ten years.
Twelve weeks
He also made an offer: give him twelve weeks and he would change this man's life. It would be hard, he warned. The reply was that it wouldn't be, because once the mind is set, every instruction gets followed exactly.
The results
It took six weeks. His clarity and his legs got better, along with other problems he had been dealing with, and the sleep apnea that used to wake him almost every night, sometimes with vomiting, was gone.
He and his wife believe the ten-year estimate was too generous. Given how he slept and everything else going on, they had figured he had less.
Why does sleep apnea wake people repeatedly?
In obstructive sleep apnea, the muscles around the throat relax during sleep and the airway narrows or closes. Breathing stalls until oxygen drops and carbon dioxide builds, and the brain briefly wakes the sleeper to reopen the airway. The wake-ups are often too short to remember, yet they break the night's sleep into pieces. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine counts 30 or more breathing interruptions per hour as severe.
How do blood tests estimate biological age?
Researchers build these estimates by comparing blood markers with how long people in large groups went on to live. A 2018 study led by Morgan Levine, published in the journal Aging, combined nine blood markers with calendar age into a measure called PhenoAge. Another approach, an epigenetic clock described by Steve Horvath in 2013, reads chemical tags on DNA. In large follow-up studies, people whose measured biological age ran ahead of their calendar age had higher death rates.
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