Why GrimAge May Be the Most Overlooked Blood Test for Anyone Affected by Cancer

If you have cancer, there are two fights: one against the tumor and one against the accelerated biological aging that gave it a foothold. Most oncologists are fighting only one. The treatments saving your life are simultaneously accelerating the aging of every healthy cell in your body, and almost no one is measuring that cost. If you are in remission, the tumor may be gone, but the accelerated aging that helped create it is not. If no one has measured it, no one is fixing it, and the biological terrain left behind after treatment may actually be more hospitable to recurrence than the environment that allowed the cancer to form in the first place. If you have never had cancer and want to keep it that way, the inflammatory and immune conditions quietly building inside you right now are the very conditions that will determine whether a future malignant cell is destroyed on sight or allowed to take root, and your annual bloodwork cannot see any of it.

There is a single blood test that can. It is called GrimAge, and it reads the chemical tags written directly into your DNA with a precision unmatched by anything else in clinical science. It reveals how fast your body is actually aging on the inside, which specific biological systems are losing ground, and exactly where a knowledgeable physician like Dr. Thomas needs to intervene. It is the most important test most people touched by cancer have never heard of, and for many, the window in which it can do the most good is still open. What follows is the case for why this test belongs in your cancer strategy, whether you are in treatment, in remission, or working to make sure you never need either.

Ready to find out where you stand? The GrimAge test requires a single blood draw, no fasting, and costs $425, which includes a phlebotomist who comes to your home. To get started or to ask questions before you commit, email Dr. Thomas at info@healthyandstrong.com. If you want to understand why this matters before you take that step, click here to watch a 6½-minute video. To learn even more, keep reading …

Cancer Is Fundamentally a Disease of Aging

For anyone who has faced a cancer diagnosis, the most important number in your chart is not your age. It is how fast your body has been aging on the inside, and that number has almost certainly never been measured.

We live in a culture that spends enormous energy on the outside, on the appearance of youth, the look of vitality, the impression of health. But what good is it to look young on the outside if your biology is quietly aging on the inside? What good is smooth skin and a trim waistline if your immune cells are exhausted, your inflammatory chemistry is smoldering, and the chemical signatures written into your DNA are telling a very different story than the mirror is? Looks can be deceiving, and nowhere does that truth carry more weight than in cancer. The body can deceive the eye. It cannot deceive its own molecular biology.

What matters is how old you actually are on the inside, measured not in years lived but in the biological currency your body is spending: the burden of inflammation building in your tissues, the state of your immune surveillance, and the DNA methylation patterns that record every stress and every year of wear your cells have absorbed. That interior age, your biological age, can run a decade younger than the calendar, buying you resilience and time. Or it can run a decade older, silently creating the very terrain in which cancer is most likely to take root. There is now a single blood test that can measure that interior age with a degree of precision unmatched by anything else in clinical science. It is called GrimAge, and it may be the most important test anyone touched by cancer has never heard of.

The statistics bear this out. The median age at cancer diagnosis in the United States is 67 years, and roughly 88% of all cancers are diagnosed in people aged 50 or older. Over 2 million new cases are projected for 2026 alone. This concentration reflects not merely accumulated carcinogenic exposures but a convergence of aging-specific biological processes, including somatic mutation accumulation, cellular senescence, immune decline, and chronic inflammation, that collectively transform the aging body into fertile ground for malignancy.

This is not to say cancer is exclusively a disease of the old. But a 38-year-old who develops colon cancer or breast cancer may not be as young as their birth year suggests. Accelerated biological aging, driven by chronic stress, poor sleep, metabolic dysfunction, and sustained inflammation, can compress decades of biological wear into a much shorter span of calendar time. A person who is 38 chronologically but carrying a biological age of 52 is not defying the rule that cancer is a disease of aging. They are confirming it. The calendar misled us. Their biology did not.

Conventional medicine has been asking the wrong question for decades. The question is not whether cancer runs in your family. The question is how fast your body is aging on the inside, because that is the biological ground on which cancer either gains a foothold or fails to.

How Accelerated Aging and Cancer Feed Each Other

The relationship between aging and cancer is not a one-way street. It is a vicious cycle: accelerated aging builds the terrain cancer needs, and cancer accelerates the aging of the body it inhabits.

As the body ages biologically, senescent cells accumulate in tissues and secrete inflammatory proteins that remodel the local environment; immune surveillance falters as T-cell production declines; and chronic low-grade inflammation feeds both processes in a self-reinforcing loop. These are the conditions that make a tumor possible, and each of them is reflected in the components GrimAge reads.

Cancer itself, even before a single chemotherapy drug is administered, behaves as an accelerated aging event. Growing tumors commandeer local tissue resources, sustain chronic oxidative stress, and amplify the very inflammatory and senescent signaling pathways that GrimAge measures most heavily. The tumor does not simply occupy space. It rewrites the biology of the body around it, pushing the molecular clock forward in the same directions that made the cancer possible in the first place.

Aging builds the terrain. Cancer accelerates the aging. The accelerated aging rebuilds the terrain. Unless something interrupts that loop, each turn of the cycle makes the next one more likely. That is why shifting the question from “Why did I get cancer?” to “Why is my body aging so fast on the inside?” changes everything about what a person can actually do, and when.

What GrimAge Is Actually Measuring

GrimAge is an epigenetic clock developed at UCLA by biostatistician Steve Horvath and mathematician Ake Lu, calibrated against actual mortality outcomes across tens of thousands of people in multiple large population biobanks. Rather than relying on chronological age as a proxy for biological wear, GrimAge measures DNA methylation, those specific chemical tags on DNA whose patterns shift in response to everything your cells have experienced: chronic inflammation, metabolic stress, immune activation, oxidative damage, and environmental exposures. It is through those methylation patterns that GrimAge identifies the cellular decay that precedes and enables cancer, reading the molecular record of biological experience written directly into the chemistry of your DNA. The result is expressed as a biological age in years. A 58-year-old whose GrimAge returns at 64 is aging six years faster than the calendar, a gap that carries measurable consequences for disease risk, immune function, and functional decline.

What makes GrimAge unique among the growing family of biological age tests is what it was trained to predict. Not chronological age. Not general wellness. Death itself. It is the only major epigenetic clock whose training target was actual mortality data, a design decision that gives it a mechanistic edge no clock trained on chronological age or physiological decline can replicate. GrimAge was built from the ground up to capture what the body’s molecular machinery is actually communicating about its trajectory toward disease and death, rather than simply estimating how many years a person appears to have lived.

The consequence of that design is evident in large-scale comparative research. GrimAge outperforms every other epigenetic clock currently in clinical or research use, including Horvath, Hannum, PhenoAge, TruAge, and DunedinPACE, in predicting all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality. Analyses conducted through the National Institute on Aging confirm GrimAge as the single most accurate mortality predictor among epigenetic clocks, a distinction it holds across multiple independent cohorts and population groups. The reason traces directly to its architecture. Rather than estimating biological age from a single composite score, GrimAge builds its prediction using DNA methylation surrogates for specific plasma proteins, including GDF-15, PAI-1, cystatin C, and leptin, each of which is an independent, powerful predictor of disease and death. That combination captures multi-system biological stress in a way no single biomarker or competing clock has been able to match.

Its mortality prediction in GrimAge version 2 carries a meta-analysis p-value of 3.6 × 10−167 across more than 13,000 samples. Nothing in the history of biomarker science has ever predicted mortality with that accuracy from a single blood test.

But GrimAge does not only predict how long a person is likely to live. It also predicts how well they are likely to live in the years they have remaining, and that second prediction may matter even more than the first. Medicine has long focused on lifespan, the total number of years a person lives. What has received far less attention is healthspan: the number of years lived in genuine health, free of chronic disease, functional decline, and progressive disability that so often define the final chapter. Most people, when they say they want to live a long life, mean something very specific: they want to remain themselves, capable, clearheaded, independent, and present for the people and purposes that give that life its meaning. They want to be the grandparent who gets down on the floor to play, not the one watching from a hospital bed through a phone screen.

What makes this distinction critical in the cancer context is that cancer and its treatments do not merely shorten lifespan. They compress healthspan. A survivor who emerges from treatment with a biological age running a decade ahead of the calendar is not simply at higher risk of dying sooner. They are at higher risk of spending their remaining years navigating cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction, cognitive decline, frailty, and the chronic fatigue that so many survivors describe, but standard oncology has no framework to address. The published research confirms that GrimAge strongly predicts both lifespan and healthspan, a dual prediction no other epigenetic clock has matched with the same statistical power.

What that dual prediction means is something medicine has never been able to offer before: a scientifically grounded estimate of both how long a person has left to live and how much of that remaining time is likely to be spent in genuine health, if nothing changes. GrimAge cannot predict a car accident or a lightning strike. What it can tell you is what your current rate of biological aging projects into the future, in both directions. If your biological age is running eight years ahead of the calendar and nothing is done to slow or reverse that acceleration, the math is not abstract. It is a shorter life, arrived at sooner than the calendar would have predicted, with the years of decline compressed into a window most people assumed was still decades away.

That is an uncomfortable sentence to read. It is meant to be. Because the entire value of that projection lies in the word “if.” If nothing changes. GrimAge does not tell you when you will die. It tells you when you are on track to die at your current biological pace, and that distinction makes all the difference in the world. A projected trajectory is not a destiny. It is a departure point for every intervention, every lifestyle commitment, and every clinical decision that a knowledgeable physician can bring to bear on the biology driving that number. The person who receives a GrimAge result showing significant acceleration and responds by working with a skilled physician to address the specific biological processes behind that score is no longer the person the projection described. They have changed the inputs. The projection changes with them.

Trained on Death, Built for Life

There is an understandable instinct, when a person first learns that GrimAge was trained on actual time-to-death data, to recoil. A test calibrated against mortality outcomes across tens of thousands of people sounds, at first encounter, less like a medical tool and more like a countdown. That reaction is human, and it deserves to be acknowledged rather than dismissed. For someone who has already faced a cancer diagnosis, or who is doing everything possible to avoid one, the last thing they may feel they need is another number to worry about.

But discomfort with a truth does not make the truth less consequential. And in the specific case of biological aging and cancer, it is precisely the people who find the question too frightening to ask who are most likely to be harmed by the answer they never received.

There is an old saying, intended as reassurance, that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. In the biology of aging and cancer, it is exactly wrong. What you don’t know about your biological age can hurt you quietly, over the years, while you feel reasonably well, your annual bloodwork returns nothing alarming, and your scans find nothing to treat. Biological age acceleration does not announce itself with dramatic symptoms. It accumulates silently, deepening the inflammatory and senescent conditions in which cancer is most likely to take hold, while the person carrying those conditions remains entirely unaware. The absence of a diagnosis is not the same as the presence of health. GrimAge exists to close that gap, and declining to use it does not make the underlying biology any less real. It simply means the biology proceeds without anyone watching, without anyone intervening, and without the window of time in which something could actually be done.

Most people, when asked directly, say they would want to know if something serious were wrong with their health, as long as something could be done about it. That is exactly what GrimAge offers. This is not a test that confirms your worst fears and leaves you without a path forward. It is a test that identifies a correctable trajectory early enough to correct it. A biological age running years ahead of the calendar is not a verdict. It is a warning with a long lead time, and lead time is the single most valuable resource in medicine. Every year of early awareness is a year in which inflammation can be addressed before it remodels tissue. Every measurable reduction in PAI-1 or GDF-15 is a step back from the conditions cancer depends on. None of that is possible without the test. And none of it is possible if the moment of awareness arrives too late for the biology to be meaningfully redirected.

GrimAge was trained on death, yes. But everything it reveals is in service of the opposite: more years, better years, and the knowledge, arriving early enough to matter, that the trajectory of your life is still yours to shape.

For the Person Currently in Treatment

You are in the hardest stretch. The treatments you are enduring carry real costs to your body, and the fatigue, the brain fog, the sense that something fundamental has shifted inside you is not imaginary. It is biological and measurable. What follows is not a reason to doubt your treatment. It is a reason to understand what your treatment is costing the rest of your biology, so that cost can be actively managed rather than silently absorbed.

Your treatment is working on your behalf, and it deserves your full commitment. Your oncology team is tracking tumor response with imaging, biopsy, and blood markers specific to your cancer type. What those measurements largely do not capture is what is happening to the rest of your biology while treatment does its job. And what is happening to the rest of your biology is not a secondary concern. It may ultimately determine whether the treatment succeeds.

Cancer does not arise in healthy tissue. It arises in tissue that has been quietly degraded by three interlocking conditions. The first is the buildup of senescent cells, cells so damaged they can no longer divide safely, but instead of dying as they should, they linger in the tissue and leak a slow, toxic brew of inflammatory proteins into their surroundings. That inflammatory output remodels the tissue around them, suppresses the immune cells that are supposed to be patrolling for cancer, and makes it easier for malignant cells to survive and spread. One of those inflammatory proteins, PAI-1, the protein GrimAge reads most heavily, does something specific and alarming when elevated: it promotes the formation of a fibrin coating around cancer cells, essentially wrapping residual tumor clusters in a biological shield that the immune system cannot easily penetrate. This is a documented mechanism, not a metaphor.

The second condition is immune exhaustion. The T cells and natural killer cells responsible for hunting down cancer cells lose their killing capacity as biological age advances, and the surveillance system that should catch abnormal cells early begins operating at a fraction of its design capacity. The third condition is chronic low-grade inflammation, which feeds the first two in a self-reinforcing loop. More senescent cells produce more inflammatory signals, which create more cellular stress, which produces more senescent cells.

What makes all of this especially urgent during treatment is that chemotherapy and radiation are among the most powerful accelerants of these same processes. This is not a reason to refuse treatment. It is a reason to understand what treatment costs the body and to have a plan for offsetting that cost. Chemotherapy eliminates rapidly dividing cancer cells, but it also damages healthy cells throughout the body, and many of those healthy cells respond by becoming senescent themselves rather than simply dying. Radiation does the same within its treatment field. The result is a wave of new senescent cells that amplify the very conditions the cancer had already established. At the same time, chemotherapy directly damages the energy-producing machinery within healthy cells, impairing the metabolic fitness that immune cells need to mount an effective anti-tumor response. When GDF-15, one of GrimAge’s key components and a marker of mitochondrial damage, remains elevated long after treatment ends, it signals that the immune system remains compromised and the environment remains more hospitable to residual disease than it should be.

The implication is direct: if the biological conditions that gave cancer its foothold go unaddressed, the environment left behind when treatment ends may actually be more favorable to recurrence than the one that existed at diagnosis. That is not inevitable. It is a reversible biological problem with identifiable targets, measurable signals, and available interventions. GrimAge gives those targets a precise readout, and a knowledgeable integrative physician knows how to act on it, using nutrition, movement, sleep, targeted supplementation, and, where appropriate, prescription-level tools to counter what treatment is costing the body in real time. The right integrative physician does not work around your oncology team. They work alongside it, filling the gap between what conventional cancer care is designed to do and what your whole biology needs in order to recover fully.

For the Person in Remission

You rang the bell. You finished treatment. And yet something still does not feel right, a lingering fatigue, a sense that your body has not fully returned to the person you were before. That feeling is not weakness and it is not anxiety. It is your biology telling you that the work is not finished, even if your oncology team says the cancer is gone.

Finishing treatment does not mean the biological work is finished. The body that emerges from chemotherapy, radiation, or immunotherapy is carrying a measurable aging burden that does not simply resolve on its own once therapy stops. For many survivors, the biological age gap between where they are and where they should be continues to widen in the months and years following treatment, quietly shaping whether long-term health recovers or erodes.

This is where GrimAge becomes one of the most valuable tools a survivor can have. Rather than waiting and watching, which is the default posture of most post-treatment care, GrimAge monitoring gives survivors and their physicians something concrete to track: whether the biological landscape is recovering, which systems are lagging, and where targeted support is most urgently needed. The goal is not simply to be free of detectable cancer. It is to rebuild the internal environment in which cancer is least likely to return, and to do so with objective measurement rather than hope or wishful thinking.

Consider what a persistently elevated GDF-15 component means in a survivor twelve months out from chemotherapy. GDF-15 is GrimAge’s surrogate for mitochondrial stress, and when it remains elevated well after treatment ends, it signals that the cellular energy machinery has not recovered. That has consequences extending well beyond fatigue. Mitochondrial dysfunction suppresses the metabolic flexibility that immune cells require for effective surveillance, and it sustains the oxidative environment in which DNA damage accumulates rather than repairs. A survivor whose GrimAge score is driven largely by a lagging GDF-15 carries a specific, identifiable vulnerability within the very system most responsible for detecting and eliminating residual malignant cells. That is not a reason for alarm. It is a reason for a targeted protocol, one that a knowledgeable physician can design with precision once the data makes the problem visible.

That rebuilding process is precisely what an integrative physician is trained to guide. Rather than generic survivorship recommendations, a physician who understands how to read a component-level GrimAge report can design a personalized recovery protocol: a map of where your biology actually stands and a coherent, evidence-informed plan for moving it in the right direction. For anyone in remission, that combination of measurement and guided action may be the most important investment in long-term health they can make.

For the Person Who Has Not Had Cancer but Wants to Prevent It

You have not had cancer, and you intend to keep it that way. Maybe it runs in your family. Maybe you have watched someone you love go through it and made a quiet promise to yourself that you would do whatever was in your power to avoid that road. Or maybe you simply understand, intuitively or intellectually, that prevention is a better strategy than treatment. What follows is about the single most informative measurement currently available for the biological conditions that determine whether cancer gains a foothold, and why it belongs in your prevention strategy long before any tumor has had the chance to form.

GrimAge was not designed as a cancer screening tool. It was designed to predict mortality. But because the biological processes it measures, including cellular senescence, chronic inflammation, immune aging, and metabolic dysregulation, are the same processes that enable cancer initiation and progression, GrimAge acceleration consistently precedes cancer diagnosis in prospective cohort research. For someone who has not had cancer but wants to keep it that way, that predictive power is not incidental. It is the point.

What GrimAge offers the prevention-minded person is something no standard screening tool can provide. Colonoscopy detects polyps that have already formed. Mammography detects tumors already present. Low-dose CT finds lung nodules already growing. Each of these is valuable, and none should be skipped. But every one of them answers the same question: is something already there? GrimAge answers the prior question: Is your body building the biological environment in which something is likely to form? A 55-year-old with a biological age of 50 has a more capable immune surveillance system, lower inflammatory burden, and more intact DNA repair capacity than a 55-year-old with a biological age of 62. Those differences determine whether a cell that acquires a cancer-enabling mutation is cleared or allowed to proliferate. That is not a subtle distinction. It is the difference between a body that is actively defending itself and one that has quietly stopped doing so.

The molecular lever most responsible for that difference may be PAI-1, the protein GrimAge reads most heavily, whose levels track the accumulation of senescent cells and the inflammatory signaling that progressively erodes surveillance capacity. What makes PAI-1 so central to the prevention conversation is not just what it predicts in GrimAge data, but what happens in real human populations when it is naturally and permanently reduced. The SERPINE1 mutation study, involving 177 Old Order Amish individuals in Indiana, illustrates this at its most dramatic. Carriers of a naturally occurring mutation that produced 50% lower lifelong PAI-1 levels had a median lifespan 10 years longer than non-carriers, zero cases of type 2 diabetes, and significantly longer telomeres. No drug, no supplement, and no genetic intervention has ever produced a human longevity benefit of that magnitude in a controlled study. The mutation simply produced less of the senescent and inflammatory signaling that GrimAge was designed to detect. That natural experiment points directly to the biological levers cancer prevention should be pulling.

For someone focused on prevention, the most important thing GrimAge provides is not a single alarming number but a specific, component-level map of which biological processes are accelerating and which are on track. That map transforms prevention from a set of general good intentions into a targeted, measurable strategy. It tells you not just that something needs to change, but what, specifically, needs to change, and it gives you and your physician a way to measure whether the changes you are making are actually working at the molecular level. An integrative physician who understands how to read that map and uses its data to guide a prevention protocol, adjusting course as serial testing reveals what is and is not responding, is precisely the physician who can help you turn a family history of cancer into a personal history of having avoided it.

The Practical Case for Testing and Tracking

GrimAge testing is available through clinical laboratories and can be ordered through an integrative medicine or longevity medicine practitioner. The test requires a single blood draw and returns a biological age estimate along with component-level data showing which biological processes are most accelerated in a given individual.

For someone currently in cancer treatment, a baseline test before treatment and a follow-up six to twelve months later provides concrete evidence of whether supportive care interventions are offsetting the biological aging toll of therapy. For someone in remission, serial testing at six-month or annual intervals tracks whether the underlying biology is recovering as it should. For someone focused on prevention, a single test at 45 or 50 establishes a baseline against which future lifestyle changes, and their measurable effects, can be assessed. One important caveat deserves a plain statement. GrimAge is a research-validated biomarker of biological aging and mortality risk. It is not a diagnostic for cancer, a treatment guide, or a replacement for standard oncology care. What it is, for anyone touched by cancer or working to avoid it, is the most biologically honest mirror currently available for the processes that matter most.

What to Expect from the Test

If you are ready to take that step, here is what the process looks like. The test requires a standard blood draw with no fasting required. GrimAge costs $425, which includes a phlebotomist coming to your home to draw your blood. The sample is sent to a specialized methylation analysis laboratory, and results typically return within three to four weeks. Medicare and insurance plans do not cover epigenetic age testing, which is one reason it is most commonly ordered through integrative or longevity medicine practices that operate outside the constraints of insurance-driven care.

What the report returns is not a single number but a layered picture of your internal biology. You will see your overall GrimAge, expressed as a biological age that can be compared directly to your chronological age, and you will see the individual component scores, including GDF-15, PAI-1, cystatin C, leptin, and the other surrogates, that reveal which specific biological processes are driving your result. A person whose overall GrimAge is five years accelerated but whose PAI-1 is the dominant contributor is in a different clinical situation than a person with the same overall acceleration driven primarily by GDF-15 or leptin. The first points toward a senescent and inflammatory burden that calls for one set of interventions; the second points toward mitochondrial and metabolic recovery that calls for a different set entirely. That specificity is what allows a knowledgeable physician to design a targeted protocol rather than offering generic recommendations.

For anyone weighing whether the investment is worth it, consider what is actually being purchased: not a single snapshot, but a crucial biological baseline against which every future decision about your health can be measured. The cost of not knowing is not zero. It is simply deferred, and biology does not wait for a more convenient time to collect.

Why a Knowledgeable and Experienced Integrative Physician is Crucial

GrimAge reveals something that a standard oncology appointment, an annual physical, or a cancer screening panel is not designed to address: what your biology is actually doing beneath the surface, and where it is heading. Reading a GrimAge score is one thing. Knowing what to do with it is another entirely, and that distinction matters more in the cancer context than in almost any other clinical situation.

While lifestyle changes are foundational, there are meaningful limits to what diet, exercise, and behavioral modification can accomplish, particularly for patients whose biology has been reshaped by cytotoxic treatment or for those carrying decades of accumulated biological age acceleration before a diagnosis ever arrived. For most patients, dietary quality, regular exercise, restorative sleep, and targeted supplementation will move the biological needle in the right direction, and for many people touched by cancer, committing seriously to those foundations is the right first step. But for a meaningful subset, the clock may remain stubbornly advanced despite genuine and sustained lifestyle effort, and working with an integrative physician may be necessary to deploy the advanced medical interventions required to reverse rapid aging at the molecular level.

This is particularly true for those in whom the inflammatory and senescent signaling GrimAge reads most heavily has become self-reinforcing in ways that behavior change alone cannot fully reverse. When that is the clinical picture, the honest question is not whether the patient has tried hard enough. It is whether lifestyle modification alone is sufficient.

For some patients, the answer is no. Each GrimAge component reflects a specific, mechanistically understood biological process, and for some of those processes, prescription-level intervention may be what is required to move the needle. The pharmacological tools to address them exist. Many are not compounds developed for longevity purposes but medications already approved for other conditions, with decades of human safety data, whose mechanisms of action happen to intersect directly with the biology GrimAge was built to measure. Off-label prescribing of this kind is not fringe medicine. It accounts for roughly one in five prescriptions written in the United States and represents standard clinical practice whenever a physician’s judgment, informed by the evidence, supports its use. The challenge is that making that judgment well, in the specific context of GrimAge and cancer biology, requires a physician who has actually read the relevant literature, understands what each clock component is signaling in a patient who has faced cancer, and has experience translating that understanding into a personalized, carefully monitored protocol.

A conventional oncologist is appropriately focused on tumor response, treatment toxicity, and surveillance for recurrence. A conventional primary care physician is constrained by time and trained to manage diagnosed diseases rather than to optimize biological trajectories. Neither is structurally positioned to interpret a component-level GrimAge report or design an integrated protocol based on its findings. That is not a criticism of either specialty. It is a description of what each is built to do. The physician this work requires is one trained in integrative or longevity medicine, with a genuine grounding in cancer biology, experienced with the full range of interventions, including medications that may be appropriate when lifestyle efforts reach their ceiling, and committed to close monitoring rather than casual prescribing.

For the patient whose GrimAge score reflects biology running years ahead of schedule, finding that physician is not a luxury or an add-on to a cancer strategy. It is the strategy’s necessary next chapter. If you do not yet have a physician in your corner who thinks this way, it may be time to find one.

Note: If you are unable to find a qualified physician in your area, Dr. Thomas is available to order the GrimAge test, interpret your results, and, most importantly, help implement targeted strategies to move your biology in the right direction. He can be reached at drthomas@healthyandstrong.com.

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