This test panel shows us your personalized prescription for living longer while living better.
Understanding Your Cardiometabolic Risk
Go beyond basic cholesterol testing to uncover your true risk for cardiometabolic diseases like heart attack and stroke. This advanced diagnostic package measures critical markers your standard physical misses—including arterial inflammation, genetic factors like Lp(a), homocysteine levels, and detailed lipid particle analysis that reveals hidden cardiovascular threats.
Perfect for health-conscious individuals with family history of heart disease or those who want actionable insights to protect their cardiovascular future before problems arise.
Once we have that understanding, we can assess if any numbers are dangerously elevated, indicating you have a higher risk of impending heart attack or stroke. If that’s the case, we’ll craft a plan together to reduce your risk and avert potential disasters through a tailored blend of diet, exercise, lifestyle modifications, medication, and supplementation.
Additional Testing
At Pinnacle, we place a high priority on holistic health, so we love measuring fitness not just for performance’s sake, but as an important data point for your overall health and quality of life. It’s something we can monitor over time, so it’s valuable now and later, too.
In addition to understanding your risk for cardiometabolic disease or events, you may also be interested in a DEXA Scan or in VO2 Max testing. Read on to learn more.
DEXA Scan
You probably know your weight. But most people don’t know what’s going on beneath the surface–what those pounds are actually made up of. And looks alone can’t tell us much about our bone density, lean tissue, or visceral fat. That’s where the gold standard of body composition measurement steps in: the DEXA scan.
DEXA stands for Dual-Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry. It’s a safe, low-level X-ray that can differentiate between bone, fat, and lean tissue—and it can do so with much greater detail and accuracy than other body composition scans.
Because X-rays pass through different tissues at varying rates, we get a detailed image and breakdown of tissue types. It only takes minutes to do, yet it gives us an exceptionally accurate snapshot of your body’s makeup, which is highly valuable information for everyone from athletes to patients working on weight management, patients receiving hormone therapy, and more.
We partner with Inland Imaging for DEXA Scans. To schedule your DEXA Scan, please call 509-455-4455.
VO2 Max
The very name “VO2 Max Testing” sounds like something for hard-core athletes. And it’s certainly beneficial for them. But it’s also a great idea for anyone who might benefit from an accurate measure of their cardiovascular and respiratory health.
A VO2 Max test measures how much oxygen our bodies use during exercise. You hop on a treadmill or bike and breathe into a mask that measures how much air you’re inhaling and exhaling. The test isn’t done in an intimidating or judgmental way—we’re just here to gather information. From that, we’re able to extrapolate a number of helpful indicators about your overall wellbeing, and form a plan to maximize your fitness, longevity, and healthspan.
We partner with Power Wellness for VO2 Max testing. Appointments can be scheduled here.
Our Approach
Often, we’ll recommend a cardiometabolic risk assessment as part of your greater treatment plan, whether you’re seeing us for help with weight management, hormone support, or something else.
We order the tests from a local partner lab, where they do a simple blood draw. Results take about a week to come back, and we sit down to walk through everything the tests uncovered. Your Pinnacle doctor will provide you with a thorough writeup explaining every result and what it means for you personally.
If your risk is elevated, don’t worry, you’re not alone in figuring out what to do. We may recommend further testing, like a coronary CT calcium score, to understand exactly what damage has already been done and inform how aggressive to be in treatment.
We can also perform genomic testing panels to check your response to cholesterol-controlling statin medications. We can even set you up with a ten-day continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to understand what affects your individual blood sugar. At Pinnacle, your treatment will be completely personalized so you walk away empowered with answers, not befuddled by hard-to-understand unknowns.
Read More
Whether you’re a 40 year-old marathon runner who eats a plant-based diet or you’re a 70 year-old working toward a healthy weight and fitness regimen, we can gain invaluable information by understanding what’s really going on in your blood vessels. Whether or not you “look” healthy or feel healthy, we can detect abnormal numbers that warn us early about potential dangers and how to avoid them.
We want to do everything possible to expand your healthspan, giving you as many vibrant, independent decades of life possible. Nobody wants to spend that chapter of life bedridden, debilitated, and unable to speak after suffering heart attacks and strokes.
So let’s get to work.
CMR Assessment
Understand your specific risk for life-altering events like heart attack and stroke-
Cardiometabolic Risk Assessment $499
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An evaluation that looks at your specific risk for life-altering events like heart attack and stroke.
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We evaluate eight labs that look critically at your innate individual cardiovascular risk profile including genetic marker Lp(a), ApoB, Uric acid, Homocysteine, heart-specific inflammatory markers like hs-CRP, and more.
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Membership from $199/mo
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Ongoing reassessment and evaluation; access to your physician via text, phone, email, and telehealth; member discounts on labs, supplements, and skincare.
Read more about protecting your cardiometabolic health:
Knowing is the first step toward doing.
We know that medicine is about more than numbers and stats. It’s about real human lives, and we’re here to provide the answers and insights you need about cardiometabolic risk so you can take the reins in creating a brighter long-term healthspan.
First, we’re here to help explain what cardiometabolic risk is. It’s your likelihood of experiencing a future health emergency like stroke and heart attack, which can be deadly at worst, and devastating at best. They can either end our lives or leave us permanently compromised or even bed-ridden. This is a scary reality, but the fact is, with the right testing, we can see these things well ahead of time. And, with the right action plan, you can drastically reduce the likelihood of such crises.
To assess your cardiometabolic risk, we look at factors that interplay with one another, like your blood sugar, cholesterol, and inflammation. Your activity level, diet, weight, stress levels, blood pressure, genetics, and smoking can all play a role in these numbers.
Standard doctor’s office tests not only oversimplify the numbers to “okay” or “not okay” cholesterol levels—they also only look at your risk for the next ten years. most of us would rather live much longer and plan accordingly. It may not sound like great news, but it’s extremely helpful to know now if you have a slowly impending heart attack on the horizon in a couple decades. Because now is the time to take action and prevent it.
There’s more to the cholesterol story than “bad” and “good.”
You’ve heard of HDL and LDL, but those are just the basics. There are more “bad” cholesterols than just LDL, and not all HDLs get reflected as part of your “good” cholesterol.
All cholesterol gets carried around by lipoproteins, and measuring those carrier proteins can give us a better look at what’s going on than a typical test would. It’s also important to measure the particle sizes of the cholesterol in your blood stream to understand your levels of inflammation and disruption to the cells in your blood vessels and heart. (It’s much more inflammatory for blood vessels to get peppered by 1,000 tiny LDL particles than it is for them to get hit with five big beach balls of LDL—and yet a typical cholesterol test would show all sizes of LDL lumped together in one number).
For example:
If a typical testing panel said your LDL is 75, you and your doctor would assume all is well. But it wouldn’t show if you’re carting around highly inflammatory LDL beebees that make your LDL’s impact much worse. If that’s the case, we’d want to treat aggressively to hit a lower target LDL number.
Welcome to feeling better.
How Pinnacle works — without getting insurance involved.
We use a direct-care model that avoids the hassle and restriction of insurance, which means we can see patients as often as they need, take more time with them, and offer more thorough care. While we leave insurance out of the patient-doctor relationship, insurance still may cover your medications, or we may be able to connect you with coupons that keep the cost of medication to a minimum.
Book your consultation
It all starts with a phone consultation so we can get to know one another and make a plan.
