Can AI Look at Your Retina and Diagnose Alzheimer’s? Eric Topol Hopes So

For decades now, it’s been fairly well established that once you turn 40 you should start paying attention to your body. That’s when women are supposed to start getting mammograms and men are supposed to start paying a bit more attention to their prostates. Over the next decade, you’ll start getting colonoscopies, and from then on out, it feels like a gradual march of doctor’s appointments and tests until your body collapses sometime in your ‘70s or ‘80s.

But what if modern medicine has the timeline all wrong? What if we’re testing some middle-aged people unnecessarily for diseases they’ll most likely never get, but blindly ignoring 20-somethings who might be prone to colon cancer? Is there a way that, even as we age, we can stay healthy in a way that’s both meaningful and not reliant on taking 12 horse-sized pills every morning ...