Blood tells the unique, complex story of our own personal health and wellness. We have come to expect having it drawn and evaluated, and some of us cross our fingers that the all-familiar blood panel will come back showing normal levels of everything from cholesterol  to white blood cell counts. But what does our blood really say about us? Are we leveraging all of the information that our blood reveals not only about our health at a moment in time, but as a baseline measurement for determining when our bodies begin to transition to a state of sub-optimal wellness? Can our blood, along with other individual measurements [maybe link to bio age article that centers on some other aspect of deep phenotyping], be our best tool for predicting our risk for disease [link to article 4] or even what medications would work best for us? 

In this paper we draw on our pioneering wellness scholarship[study?] in which we followed "100 Pioneers" as they participated in a wellness program practicing P4 Medicine [link] in order to examine the predictive power of our blood, moving beyond the basic blood panel to treating blood as a unique window into personal wellness. 

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Results roundup:

• Human physiology is a complex network of networks—but we can untangle these networks using a data-driven approach that uses phenomic measurements of proteins and other molecules in our blood
• We need to move away from population averages and instead compare each person to himself (referred to as an “N-of-1” approach, where “N” is the Number of people in a trial or study). So instead of your doctor emailing you a blood test that says your MCHC is “low” because it is outside the “standard range of 33.0-37.0”, she tells you that it is consistent with the last dozen times you had a blood test, and there’s no need to take any expensive medication—which may have harmful side effects—to raise it.

Delve deeper into the science with us!

https://doi.org/10.1373/clinchem.2018.299065

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