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Focusing your health assessment activities on your biggest health risk factors will make them more effective. It will allow you to work to avoid the specific problems that you’re most susceptible to.

 

Once you already have a disease, it’s already too late. At that stage, you need to focus on treatment and returning to health. But this is an inefficient way to safeguard your health. If you want to stay healthy, then you need to predict problems before they occur. This will allow you to take steps to avoid them. This might seem impossible, but it just means paying attention to symptoms that indicate problems with particular systems. And from there you can make changes that will help you avoid the associated disease. So if you’re interested in staying healthy over the long term, this is the best way to do it.

 

What is Preventative Medicine?

Preventative medicine is one of the most effective ways to retain your health over the long term. Basically, it means that you have to perform health assessment activities on a regular basis. This will allow you to identify potentially troubling symptoms and take steps to treat them or to improve the health of the associated system. Typically, the changes you make in response to a health assessment will have to do with your lifestyle. So if you find that your blood pressure is consistently high, you might exercise more or change your diet. Usually, you do most of these health assessment activities at home. But if you notice a serious problem, you can take all the data you’ve collected to your doctor. And because you have a clear record of the issue, your doctor can understand your condition better and make a more accurate diagnosis.

 

When you perform health assessment activities, you would usually monitor some if not all of the following health risk factors:

 

• Blood pressure.
• Heart rate.
• Exercise levels.
• Blood sugar levels.

 

These measurements can be a good way to measure your overall health. However, they also indicate more than this. They can indicate the health of various systems in your body. So if your blood pressure increases, it can indicate a problem with your cardiovascular system. These types ofabnormalities can occur long before a specific disease can be diagnosed. In this way, taking these measurements can act as an early warning sign of serious problems or diseases. And paying attention to any changes can allow you to take action early and avoid more serious problems.

 

Catching potential problems early can be the key to managing them and even avoiding further developments. At the early stage, going to your doctor may not help as the disease itself hasn’t developed yet. So if you want to avoid this, you need to make lifestyle changes that will alleviate your symptoms and improve the health of the associated system.

 

Finding the Weakest Link

The problem with this approach is that it isn’t always straight forward. Although you might have a specific set of symptoms, you can’t always know which disease they are leading to. This could result in an unfocused response that isn’t effective because it doesn’t target the declining system.

 

The best way to overcome this problem is by using logic. Everyone has weak points that are serious health risk factors. These are systems or problems in your body that are always, and have always been a problem for you. Logic dictates that these will be the first systems to show signs of problems. Thus they should be the primary focus of your health monitoring activities.

 

Some of the following health risk factors can cause one of these weak links:

 

• Genetic problems passed down to you that make you prone to specific problems.
• A family history of specific diseases.
• Previous injuries or illnesses that have weakened specific systems or organs.

 

These factors can be used to get a clearer image of the weak points in your body. It will also give you a better idea of which lifestyle changes you need to make to safeguard your overall health. But if you want to perform more specific preventative changes, you need more information.

 

The Future of Prevention

A recent study has suggested that certain organs age at different rates. This is important because aging is a serious health risk that causes a number of serious problems. This is measured by monitoring the length of telomeres in specific organs. Telomeres are located at the ends of chromosomes and they prevent the loss of genetic material during cell division. However, they also act as timekeepers. Telomeres stop growing at birth, and so the constant cell division causes them to become shorter over time. And as they get shorter, their ability to protect the cells from genetic loss starts to fail. This causes many of the problems associated with aging.

 

This can cause parts of the body to age at different rates. This is particularly true in places like the gut, where the tissue is replaced at a faster rate. So by monitoring telomeres in specific parts of the body, you can get a good idea about local aging and the potential problems that may arise.

 

The Takeaway

This research is still in its infancy. And obviously, monitoring the length of your telomeres regularly would be prohibitively expensive. So at this stage, it can’t be a part of your regular health assessment activities. But in the future, it may become a viable way to assess your health risk factors and aid in the prevention of serious diseases.

 

But until then, you need to find ways to safeguard your health and predict future problems. This will allow you to maintain your health over the long term and control specific health risk factors.

 

 

 

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, health assessment, health risk measuring