ChatGPT helped journalist Jason Aten recognize that months of worsening symptoms required urgent medical attention, then helped him understand the test results and daily decisions that followed. After returning to his home in Lansing, Michigan, from the CES tech conference, Aten assumed the flu he got every year would pass. Through the spring of 2025, his fatigue kept worsening; ordinary tasks such as mowing the lawn or walking upstairs to tuck his kids in left him short of breath.
Over Memorial Day weekend, Aten coughed up sputum with a reddish tinge. His wife, a nurse, urged him to take it seriously. Online search results felt generic and hard to act on, so he entered the mix of symptoms he had been feeling for months into ChatGPT.
ChatGPT mentioned serious possibilities, including pulmonary embolism and congestive heart failure, and told him to see a doctor right away. His doctor ordered a battery of tests. The first few came back negative, but an echocardiogram revealed congestive heart failure; Aten was 45.
Doctors measured his ejection fraction, the share of blood the heart pumps with each beat, at about 25 percent, less than half of what is healthy. He underwent more tests, including a heart catheterization and MRI, and began medications including beta blockers, some of which he expects to take for life.
As reports and test results arrived, Aten pasted them into ChatGPT and asked what they meant. When he caught a cold while traveling in Texas for his daughter’s soccer weekend, he asked whether an over-the-counter medicine such as DayQuil was safe alongside his medications and received a cautionary answer without restating his full history. He also photographs restaurant menus and asks for options that fit the low-sodium habits he is trying to maintain.
A later MRI showed that his heart function had mostly returned toward normal. Today, at 46, he feels normal again. As Aten puts it: “ChatGPT saved my life.”
