Mark Cuban created a firestorm on Twitter when he doled out healthcare advice encouraging people who could afford to do so to take control of their health information by getting their bloodwork done quarterly. The reaction was swift and clear: Mark Cuban is not a healthcare expert and should not be giving out healthcare advice, advice that can have serious personal and financial repercussions.But before dismissing his latest comments as nonsense, it's important to understand the broader movement that's sparked this type of thinking - biohacking. Biohacking has nothing to do with computers but is rather the phenomenon of patients seeking to improve their overall health by making lifestyle adjustments and monitoring health metrics for improvements (e.g., calories, sleep patterns, EEGs). Dave Asprey, Bulletproof Founder and CEO, best represents the more extreme side of biohacking having created his own Bulletproof Coffee and other techniques that he claims to have helped him lose weight, raise his IQ and lower his biological age.To a degree, Cuban’s suggestion has already been investigated in a paper published in Cell back in 2012. Stanford University geneticist Mike Snyder, dubbed the poster child for personalized medicine, exemplified this when he had his genome sequenced and had blood samples taken 20 times over the course of two years by a team of researchers to better understand the subtle changes that happened and the effect on his health. Although Snyder appeared to be healthy, the battery of multi-omics results showed that he was at high risk for Type 2 diabetes highlighting the importance of personalized medicine and a need for patient stratification based on individual omics-based testing rather than broad phenotypic characterizations. Not only does this type of testing over multiple time points establish a baseline but it can also help patients screen for certain diseases, provide prognostic information, or identify an effective course of treatment with the growth of companion diagnostics.At first glance, biohacking doesn't seem like a terrible idea. Why not try to create your "best self", and who else cares more about you than yourself? Doctors often warn patients about bad habits and encourage a healthy diet and exercise but it’s ultimately up to the patient to act on it. By monitoring and tweaking what patients put into their bodies with biohacking, they can essentially turn themselves into human test subjects and determine what elicits a positive response for them. With the advent of wearable technology, health apps and electronic medical records, patients have unprecedented access to their health data and can track it more easily. This empowers patients to take control of their health by understanding what their normal is but, at the end of the day, these biohackers are not trained medical professionals that are experimenting on themselves without objective statistical analysis or medical support and guidance which has its own risks.On a population level, biohacking has more serious and broader reaching consequences. Having an increasing number of patients monitor as many metrics of their life can lead to a lot of unnecessary testing, unactionable data, and can pose a significant burden to the overall healthcare system. Currently, most patients not considered high risk get blood tests performed at their annual doctor's visit so Cuban's suggestion of quarterly testing means that the number of tests quadruples per person. Although he caveats his recommendation as being for those who can afford to which I assume that means that they pay for this out of pocket, this doesn't take into consideration incidental findings or false positives from the increased testing. If something abnormal shows up, then the lab must follow up with your results with additional testing that requires more time, resources, physician interpretation and worry for the patient.So when it comes down to it, are quarterly blood tests a good idea? No. Although it would help individual patients establish a baseline for themselves, this quickly becomes unnecessary and increases the likelihood of getting a false positives after a certain point and creates a larger financial burden on a population level. Cuban may have thought he was just sharing a helpful piece of advice and said it was only for a few people who could afford it but with 2.8 M Twitter followers, that's not advice that just a few are going to take or are equipped to handle.For more information on companion diagnostics, read the full CDx report here.Disclaimer: Some of the companies listed above may be DeciBio clients or customers.---

Author: Melissa Campos, Sr Analyst at DeciBio Consulting, LLCcampos@decibio.comConnect with Melissa on LinkedInwww.linkedin.com/in/melissacampos