How To Evaluate Your Health Risk Over Time
QHHL 
Sep 27 2018
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0 QHHL
If you can accurately predict your health risk over time then you can reduce your chances of certain diseases. However, calculating your overall risk is made difficult because of certain confounding factors.
Monitoring your health risk factors over time is essential if you want to avoid certain diseases. However, there are a number of problems with these kinds of calculations. This can confuse the results of your health assessments and cause you to mistake the extent of your health risk. They key is to overcome this problem and accurately assess and predict your health over time. And the best way to do that is by learning more about the dangers of specific health risk factors.
Performing regular health assessments is essential for preserving your health over the long term. It allows you to identify specific health risk factors and eliminate or remove them from your life. Obviously, there are certain health risks that are fairly obvious and can be eliminated. Some very common factors are smoking, obesity, poor diet, and lack of physical exercise. All of these can be changed to have a marked effect on the quality of your life. However, there are a number of health risk factors that can’t be changed. This includes things like genetics, personal health history, gender, race and age. These are the factors which can be monitored but not changed.
Every person is a confluence of risk factors, all of them overlapping and interacting. This just adds to the unpredictability. It also makes it harder and more confusing to use these factors to assess overall health.
Identifying specific health risks is the simplest part of the calculation. More troubling and changeable, is how much specific risk factors will actually affect your health in the long term. Everyone knows someone who does everything wrong and yet remains stubbornly healthy. So it’s not as simple as saying that a certain health risk factor inevitably leads to specific health problems.
There is also the question of when diseases will appear. Underlying these calculations is the assumption that the stronger the health risk factor, the more probable the consequences are. So people who have very strong factors are much more likely to develop the associated diseases in a shorter time frame. But this clearly isn’t the case either. This may be because of the unique way in which each individual’s risk factors interact. Or there might be other, unknown factors at play. This general unpredictability is the biggest problem in assessing when and if a health event will occur. But because the ability to predict would be so valuable, there are numerous studies that are trying to achieve it.
Diabetes is an incredibly common and damaging problem in modern society. Sources suggest that 30 percent of Americans are prediabetic. And world spending on diabetes treatments and complications was 825 billion dollars in 2016. Clearly, the current strategies for dealing with this disease aren’t working. And now, Artificial Intelligence is showing that there might be a better way.
A recent study has tried to more accurately predict the risk of people developing diabetes. This study tried to better predict which prediabetic participants would become diabetic within a year. A computer algorithm used more than 25 parameters taken from health assessments. These were used to predict which patients would progress to diabetes within 12 months. And it was accurate in 64 percent of cases and ranked the participants based on risk prioritization. If this technology can be developed further, it could change the health landscape. It could allow doctors and patients to more fully understand health risk and shift the focus from management to prevention. And this would benefit everyone involved.
The social value of this research is obvious. If programs can more accurately predict patients who are at serious risk of developing diabetes it would allow for more focused interventions. It would let medical practitioners know where they should focus their efforts before it’s too late. But the breakthrough is also important on a personal level. You might not be overly concerned if you’re told you may develop diabetes ‘sometime’. But with a clear and present risk, you would have more impetus to make changes. And this could allow you to avoid this serious disease and its associated consequences.
If you’re concerned about certain health risk factors, try using HomeLab to keep track of your condition and any preventative measures you take. And if you see signs of a significant problem, you should check with your doctor as soon as possible.
Tags: Health Risk, Diabetes