PFLPhysiological Fitness Landscape

The Physiological Fitness Landscape

Health as a position on a landscape, and movement across it.

Each biomarker is an axis. Over every axis lies a measured mortality hazard curve. Together they form a terrain: low ground is resilient health, high ground is risk, and a person is a point that moves.

What the landscape is made of

Curves. 238 biomarkers, each with a continuous all-cause mortality hazard curve drawn from published cohorts. 492 sources are verified by PMID or DOI.

Populations. Measured distributions by age and sex, so every position is read against people like you. There are 1,686 distribution cells from NHANES, MIDUS and the literature.

Movement. Within-person change over up to 16 years from the Health and Retirement Study, with replication in England (ELSA) and Costa Rica (CRELES).

Levers. 304 catalogued interventions with their measured effects on specific biomarkers, and 107 chronic diseases mapped as regions of the terrain.

The loop it supports

  1. MeasureRoutine labs and simple functional tests.
  2. LocatePlace the person on every curve at once.
  3. UnderstandRead slope, drift and nearby cliffs.
  4. InterveneChoose the move that lowers risk most.
  5. Re-measureSee whether the person actually moved.
  6. UpdateRefine the map for them and for everyone.

The central hypothesis

One shared landscape, with a small number of personal parameters for each person (position, rate of drift, sensitivity), describes how human physiology changes with age and how it responds to intervention.

If that holds, a handful of routine measurements, taken over time, can say far more than any of them alone. Testing it is the purpose of the current research programme. Where it stands.

Origins

The landscape concept was developed by Dr Brian Fertig, Dr Deepak Chopra and Dr Jack Tuszynski (Quantum Body, 2023; Fertig 2022). OpenSourceMed is building the open, quantitative implementation and testing it against cohort data.