Health Tech Wants Your Blood, and It's Offering a Vague Promise of Longer Life

Writing in the newsletter Optimizer, Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song described giving her 12th vial of blood in six weeks on an overcast Saturday morning, her 24th of the year. She books the draws early to avoid getting hungry, downloads the requisition papers in advance, skips strenuous exercise for 24 hours beforehand and drinks a glass of water so her veins are easier to find.

Twelve of the 24 vials were ordered by her doctor to monitor treatment for metabolic issues. Eight fed an experimental digital twin. The final four went to Death Clock, an app that estimates when a user will die based on current health. It currently puts her death at age 97, on Friday, October 5, 2085.

Death Clock costs $69 a year and offers what it describes as a free blood panel to calculate biological age, along with optional upsell panels recommended from the health history users upload during onboarding. It suggested tests for thyroid function, heart and artery health and liver function. Beyond blood work, the app recommended a continuous glucose monitor, a smart scale, a blood pressure monitor, a professional VO2 max evaluation, a liver ultrasound, cervical cancer screening, daily creatine monohydrate, an annual full-body skin cancer exam, a baseline coronary CT angiography, APOE testing for Alzheimer's risk and a colonoscopy. Completing everything in the app's "life lab" would, by its calculation, add 17 years, moving her death to age 114 on September 12, 2102.

Death Clock is not alone in wanting access to blood. Oura and Whoop have added partnerships with Quest Diagnostics so their users can submit samples, Google recently announced an integration with the startup Function Health, which lets people order lab tests, and Apple's new Health app will launch with a Quest Diagnostics partnership, The Verge reported. More such arrangements are expected.

Brent Franson, founder and chief executive of Death Clock, told The Verge that the premise is to confront people with mortality. "The reality is life is precious, life is short, and we're all going to die. The question is when, and I think culturally, we are in denial about death," he said. Franson said people need to understand what is happening inside their bodies in order to take their health seriously.

Later in the conversation, Franson acknowledged that the strongest predictor of longevity is socioeconomic status: wealthier people live longer because they can afford better healthcare, and blood test results say nothing about a person's income.

Song also described the limits of what blood can reveal. In April 2021, her cousin, a doctor, called in the middle of the night to say her mother, who had been slurred in speech for a month and troubled by persistent phlegm, had been rushed to the hospital struggling to breathe. Her mother had insisted it was a stubborn cold; the cousin suspected a series of mini strokes and a possible combination of stroke and heart attack, a cardiocerebral infarction.