Objective metrics that change the most as we age

brandonb 16 points 13 comments May 27, 2026
www.empirical.health · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (4 comments)

cj

Yet, the metrics in the article are routinely ignored (or not tracked at all) by your typical PCP doctor. I think more frequent and more thorough blood testing is something I'd love to see become more common place. Even if it's for no other reason than to know what your benchmark is so that if you have a health issue down the line, you know what your values were when you weren't sick.

phasefactor

The training kicks in and my knee-jerk reaction to not one of the graphs starting at zero is to discount the trustworthiness of the entire article, whether that is well deserved or not...

pedalpete

An upstream metric that can be measured daily is sleep slow-wave activity or delta power. This is the synchronous firing of neurons which define restorative deep sleep, and one of the primary patterns which we describe as the Neural Function of Sleep. This Neural Function of Sleep naturally declines with age, but more importantly, through stimulation we can enhance it which research is showing improves immune function, increases HRV, and more. So while the original post discusses markers they expect to measure every 3 months, our work at https://affectablesleep.com measures the Neural Function of Sleep daily, but not to give you a score, but to actively support how well the brain sleeps, not how long. Though there are over 50 published peer-reviewed papers in these techniques, I'm curious to see if we begin stimulation in our 30s, prior to the decline in sleep, do we slow the rate of decline as we age, as well as supporting daily function.

tzs

The Lymphocyte Percent graph shows a range from about 0.21 to 0.42, but the net tells me that the normal range is 20-40% and the results from the last time mine was tested suggests that the net is right. Is the graph something other than lymphocyte percentage that got mislabeled, did they make a mistake with the scale, or are there two things that can reasonably be called "lymphocyte" percentage and the graph is the one that is not on a CBC panel?

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
8,637 stories · 81,559 chunks indexed