Future Now
The IFTF Blog
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Predicting your future health
Not sure how new a story this is, but I have only recently come across it. With the tag line of "Know, Act, Achieve," Entelos' MyDigitalHealth promises to predict what one's health will look like in the future. The company offers to synthesize your health history, current health, and lifestyle to generate a simulation of your future health. Then you can see how changing your lifestyle today might change that picture over time.
Their first (and seemingly only) customer--David Ewing Duncan--has recently published a book called Experimental Man: What One Man's Body Reveals About His Future, Your Health, and Our Toxic World. He writes about how MyDigitalHealth predicted the likelihood of his having a heart attack (28% chance by 2017, 70% by 2027) in the book, in an article on Portfolio.com, and on his website (where you can also find book excerpts and order it, as well). This risk assessment contradicts his "internist's prognosis that [his] heart attack risk is a mere 4 percent in 10 years, a number he got during a routine checkup by matching up [Duncan's] cholesterol levels, age, and other factors to a scale considered state-of-the-art by most physicians."
In his Portfolio.com article, Duncan goes on to explain,
For the next five years, I'm okay, . . . with a nearly zero percent risk, then bam! . . . [This] assumes that I will have a normal weight gain of one pound a year for a man over 40. If I keep a stable weight, my risk factor will be closer to my internist's score, at about 4 percent. If I really want to reduce my risk, . . . taking cholesterol-lowering statins would push my risk score to zero. The message here: If I gain weight, I have a higher-than-average risk of one day clutching my chest and writhing on the floor, and possibly dying.
What do we learn from this? As you age, don't gain weight. That seems like a no-brainer. And statins can lower your risk of having a heart attack. (Perhaps at 4%, Duncan would not be a candidate for having them prescribed.) I'm not sure that most people need MyDigitalHealth's services to figure these things out.
I can only imagine how expensive a MyDigitalHealth simulation must be. I can't imagine a scenario under which insurance would ever pay for it, unless its costs came way down. But if you've got the money and the desire to gain an incredible amount of information about your body, I'd say, "Go for it."