When most people leave their annual physical, they walk out with either a clean bill of health or a prescription. What they rarely leave with is any picture of what might be quietly forming below the surface — because the tests that can show you that picture aren’t part of the standard exam. Not yet.

That’s changing. A category of advanced screening tools has moved from research labs into actual clinical practice over the past several years. These aren’t experimental. They’re available now, and most physicians can order them or refer you to someone who can. The challenge is knowing they exist and knowing the right words to use when you ask.

Here are three worth knowing.

The Galleri Test: One Blood Draw, Fifty Types of Cancer

Standard cancer screening is organ-specific and reactive. A mammogram looks at the breast. A colonoscopy looks at the colon. A low-dose CT scans the lungs for long-term smokers. Each was designed for a single cancer that had already grown large enough to detect.

The Galleri test, made by a company called GRAIL, takes a fundamentally different approach. It’s a single blood draw that uses machine learning to detect tiny fragments of DNA that cancer cells shed into the bloodstream — often years before a tumor is visible on any conventional scan. From that one tube, it can pick up signals across more than fifty cancer types, including pancreatic, ovarian, and other cancers that currently have no standard early-detection protocol at all.

It isn’t a replacement for the tests you already do. Keep the mammogram and the colonoscopy on the calendar. But for the cancers that currently have no early warning system, Galleri is the most significant tool available today.

To ask for it: call your physician’s office and ask whether a “multi-cancer early detection blood test” makes sense for your situation. If they’re not familiar with Galleri, that’s a reasonable opening to ask for a referral to a preventive or longevity medicine clinic.

AI-Read Cardiac Scans: What Your Arteries Are Actually Made Of

A coronary calcium score is a CT scan that detects calcified plaque in your arteries. If you’re over 40 with any cardiac risk factors and haven’t had one, it’s worth requesting — it’s already a meaningful step beyond what a standard physical offers.

But there’s an important layer beyond it. Calcified plaque is the older, more stable kind. The plaque more likely to cause a sudden heart attack is softer, non-calcified, and invisible to the calcium scan. Cardiologist Peter Attia notes that roughly 2–3% of people with a “perfect” calcium score of zero actually have high-risk plaque when imaged more closely.

A CT coronary angiogram (CCTA) is the scan that reveals that softer plaque. A company called Cleerly then applies artificial intelligence to the resulting images, mapping plaque by type, volume, and location — an analysis that goes well beyond what visual review alone can produce. The calcium score tells you whether there’s a problem. Cleerly’s analysis tells you what kind and where.

If your calcium score comes back at zero but you have risk factors — family history, elevated ApoB, or elevated hs-CRP — ask your physician whether a CCTA is a reasonable next step. You’re not asking for exotic medicine. You’re asking for the scan that shows what the basic scan misses.

Epigenetic Age Testing: How Old Is Your Body, Really?

Your driver’s license records one age. Your cells are tracking a different one — and researchers now have tools to read it.

Epigenetic age tests measure chemical markers called methylation patterns that accumulate on your DNA at predictable rates over time. The result is an estimate of your biological age — how fast your body is actually aging relative to your calendar age. Someone who is 58 on paper might have a biological age of 51. Or 65. The gap tells you something your birth year never could.

Labs like TruDiagnostic and Elysium Health offer these tests directly to consumers. The real value isn’t in any single reading — there’s some measurement variability — but in the trend over time. Tested annually, they give you a feedback loop on your lifestyle that didn’t exist a decade ago. The everyday levers — sleep quality, strength training, dietary patterns, fasting — all show up in these numbers. Which is a compelling reason to measure them.

How to Use This Information

None of these tests require a research hospital or an exotic specialist network — but they do require a physician who knows they exist and is willing to order them or guide you to someone who can. That’s a specific kind of physician: one who practices medicine with a preventive and longevity orientation, not just a treatment orientation.

FindLongevityMD.com lists clinics and physicians across the country who work this way. You can search by state to find someone near you who knows what Galleri and Cleerly are, can interpret your epigenetic age results, and practices from a “catch it early” rather than “treat it late” framework.

If you’d like a more personal conversation — help figuring out which of these tests makes sense for your specific history, what to do with results once you have them, or how to navigate a physician who isn’t familiar with this space — I work with a small number of individuals directly as a separate consultation. You can reach me at stan@findlongevitymd.com.

Stan Self, MD — Curator, FindLongevityMD.com
Stan practiced Family Medicine in Fairhope, Alabama for 40 years. He now curates FindLongevityMD.com, a national directory of preventive and longevity medicine clinics.

Medical Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice and does not establish a physician-patient relationship. Please consult your physician or a qualified healthcare provider before making any changes to your health care.