Sean Hashmi, MD

If you can't stand on one leg for 10 seconds, one 2022 study found your risk of dying over the next several years was about 1.84 times higher, an 84% jump. That is not a scare line. It comes from a study of more than 1,700 adults published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The good news: there is a readout you can take in your kitchen right now, and every test in this article is trainable. Below are four tests you can do at home today, what each one actually predicts, and exactly how...

You can be thin, eat clean, hit your steps, and still have the kind of belly fat that destroys your kidneys. A 2023 PLOS One cohort of 11,050 adults followed for nearly 6 years found that the highest visceral fat group had 7.5 times the risk of developing chronic kidney disease, and the strongest effect was in normal-weight people. BMI lies. The waist tells the truth. This article walks through why subcutaneous and visceral fat are biologically different, the three documented mechanisms by...

Your creatinine test may be lying to you. By the time creatinine clearly rises on a lab report, you may have already lost a third or more of your kidney function. The 2021 guidance from the National Kidney Foundation and American Society of Nephrology recommended a second test, cystatin C, as a confirmatory marker for specific patients. Four years later, most labs still default to creatinine alone. This article walks through why creatinine is actually a muscle test, what cystatin C measures,...