Full body MRI data: health screening of the brain, heart and abdomen
What is a 3D full body MRI and what did I learn from completing one at the Health Nucleus in San Diego?
Full body MRI scan technology
Full body MRI data is an incredible advancement for health screening.
As we covered in our inaugrual post, our Founder (Nick), chose the Human Longevity Inc ‘Health Nucleus’ in 2018 as the starting point for his personal comprehensive health screening journey.
The San Diego based centre, focuses on employing cutting edge capabilities for detecting disease at an early stage. Full body MRI scanning is core to their offering.
This post offers a quick overview at what this technology is capable of.
What is a full body MRI? (With Video)
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has the ability to image the inside of your body in great detail, through the use of strong magnetic fields and radio waves. It does this without the use of harmful electromagnetic radiation (like X-rays or CT scans).
At the Health Nucleus, the full body MRI scan emphasises the brain, cardiac health and cancer screening within the chest, abdomen and pelvis. It also produces valuable information about body composition.
Here is a great short video from HLI that you can view below that explains this a bit further:
Why purchase a Full body MRI?
The future of healthcare is proactive & preventative, and that future is underpinned by comprehensive health screening technologies like the full body MRI!
The current state of ‘reactive healthcare’ (only treat you once you are sick), has already pioneered nearly all of the medical treatments required to treat the most common life-threatening diseases.
This however requires that they are detected early at the ‘treatable stage’. This is where full body MRI scanning comes in handy.
A full body MRI like the one offered by the Health Nucleus, scans the brain, heart and abdomen in high resolution. Through their specialised suite of sophisticated post-processing algorithms, they are able to detect tumours that are only millimetres in diameter.
This technology can also discover brain aneurisms before they ruptures, as well as abnormalities of the heart or circulatory system.
You may be surprised to know that the Health Nucleus has found clinically significant findings in 40% of their clients! These aren’t all revealed by the full body MRI, but many of the more serious and dangerous findings are (e.g. pancreatic cancer).
What is a full body MRI experience like?
A fully body MRIO requires being inside of an MRI machine for up to 70 minutes (with a short break in between). This can be quite intimidating for some people.
Here is a short video describing Nick’s full body MRI experience:
What did a FULL body MRI reveal about me?
““I spent nearly 75 minutes in the MRI machine, watching amazing images from outer space on a ceiling-mounted monitor, while listening to relaxing transcendental music””
Example full body MRI data - The Brain
Brain analytics, highlighting the different regions of Nick’s brain.
As is the case for many folks undertaking proactive health screenings, Nick’s full body MRI did not reveal any pathological findings.
What was gathered however, was a wealth of valuable baseline data. As an example, the brain scanning established normal values for the volumes of each of the major regions of the brain.
One area of particular interest is the hippocampus, whose volume is known to decrease with age, along with a decline in short-term memory and overall ‘plasticity’ (ability to adapt to new learning).
As Nick ages, we’ll be able to monitor his hippocampus for any changes in its volume. As well as other regions under increased pressure with aging, such as the hypothalamus.
Example of full body MRI data - The Heart
Nick’s heart beating away!
Cardiac MRI is a specific type of scanning approach, which can watch the heart beat and trace the flow of blood.
For example, the ‘ejection fraction’ can be quantified, and tracked over time. Any abnormalities in heartbeat are also immediately apparent.
Cardiac MRI reveals the structure of the heart, and in particularly can detect any hypertrophy (abnormal growth of a heart chamber) or thickening of the heart wall because of high blood pressure.
Example of fully body MRI data - Visceral fat
MRI data is also exceptional at revealing body composition.
One of the more important predictors of the risk of disease and/or mortality (risk of dying) are an individual’s visceral fat levels.
Another important metric is the total volume of fat in your liver (e.g. fatty liver disease).
The full-body MRI can directly quantify these volumes, compare you to a reference population and give you clear advice on how much fat you need to lose to lower your disease risk.
FDA & TGA DISCLAIMER
This information is intended for educational purposes only and is not meant to substitute for medical care or to prescribe treatment for any specific health condition. These blog posts are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease, and only may become actionable through consultation with a medical professional.
Comprehensive health screening: Health Nucleus
Health screening is the future of healthcare
In this short 5-minute video, our founder shares personal thoughts on the future of healthcare, and why it is proactive. The technologies to prevent disease are at your disposal, will you choose to access them?
Medical screening in great socks
The future of healthcare
includes great socks 🧦
The future of healthcare is based on health screening that is proactive & preventative!
Today, we have all of the medical technology required to detect and treat the most common life-threatening diseases, provided that we can detect them early on.
This includes common killers such as cardiovascular disease (heart-attack, stroke, thrombosis), the chronic illnesses of metabolic disease (diabetes) and, of course, most cancers.
Even health screening and early detection of diseases of the brain (alzheimer's or parkinson’s) can result in extended healthspan, and slow the rate of disease progression (although a cure for these maladies will likely require changing the ageing process itself!)
Health screening gets personal
As our founder shares, health screening is part of a personal motivation for creating Longevity Blog. “In my late 20s, I had three people quite close to me, also in their late 20s, be diagnosed with cancer. In fact, one of them, was my own wife (appendix cancer)!”
“Another had stage III colon cancer. The third, stage IV testicular cancer that nearly took his life.”
In each of these cases, treatments came well after the onset of the disease, which brought on deeper thoughts on the very nature of how we detect and treat these diseases.
Health screening is how healthcare catches up to the 21st century
New longevity technologies are being developed and deployed at an increasing pace. Some forward thinkers, including our Founder, observe this trend to be exponential in nature.
This is particularly true for health screening technologies which are directly coupled with progress in computing capabilities (processing power, network communication speeds, memory availability).
However, your personal experience in the healthcare system does not make these changes immediately evident. The healthcare system has made great strides in responsive medicine - treating disease at later stages, after an acute event or advance systems are present.
Comprehensive regular health screening is available now
All of the health screening technologies required to detect diseases at an early, highly treatable stage exist NOW (at the time of writing, late 2019).
It is not technological limitations which prevents your access to these technologies. Instead, the limitations are based on 1) knowledge of alternatives, 2) financial means to access them, and 3) your personal demand for access to them.
This foundational post from the Longevity Blog will be followed by all of the information you’ll require to learn about proactive healthcare technologies and how to access them.
It will include our Founder’s personal foray into this technology space, where we’ll use his experience to thoroughly vet and explore these new technologies, to help you decide which to add to your own personalised longevity strategy.
FULL BODY HEALTH SCREENING: the Health Nucleus
Full Body 3D MRI - on the cutting edge of proactive healthcare
As you’ll soon learn, many forward thinking technologists, scientists and medical professionals have already begun to create a healthcare system worthy of the 21st Century.
Where this adventure will start, is at one of the most comprehensive health screening treatment centres in the world: Human Longevity Inc’s Health Nucleus.
Based in San Diego, California, our Founder first visited the Health Nucleus in May 2018. Where he underwent the following:
a wide-reaching blood panel
microbiome sequencing (💩)
What followed on from this visit was a complete transformation in his approach to health and wellness. It’s precisely this type of self-experimenting that helps us create unique content to guide you on your own wellness journey.
Read more about the Health Nucleus in the following posts:
