Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
english.elpais.com
Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
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Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#2It's all about trade-offs I guess. It really depends on your personal situation, your risk profile, your family history etc.
as a side note: I see El Pais trending very often the past days. Any ideas why this is happening?
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#3[flagged]
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#4Completely anecdotal, but very infrequent checks of my blood pressure over the years would always flag high and it would always be written off as a temporary stress spike at getting it taken. Otherwise I was completely healthy and had no complaints so it was ignored.
It turns out that I had crisis levels of hypertension for years, and all of those aberrant readings were actually my normal. When I finally got it diagnosed and treated -- purely thinking it might relate to sporadic mid-sleep headaches/sicknesses [1] -- discovered that years in that state had pushed my kidneys to the cusp of kidney disease, which is something that doesn't heal.
Check your blood pressure regularly. Get an Omron unit and it even logs it into a little app. Treat it early because the damage accumulates for decades.
[1] That turned out to be a newly developed absolute intolerance for alcohol. A single beer or glass of wine with dinner would have me sick all night.
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#5That’s BS if I may. How would I know I have higher cholesterol if I didn’t do blood tests?
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#6[flagged]
You may consider elaborating on that point further Dave...
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#7I find this to be dubious and honestly a little insulting. Here in the UK there is a not insignificant number of people that die from cancers because their local health practice ignored or even refused to listen to a patient.
The idea of a yearly checkup is totally foreign here unless you are going private.
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#8That’s BS if I may. How would I know I have higher cholesterol if I didn’t do blood tests?
Interestingly, the scenario is somewhat discussed in the article:
"...Rivero used as an example a request he receives frequently: to check the cholesterol of young people with no risk factors. “Checking a 32-year-old man with no history of sudden death or hypercholesterolemia in the family is pointless,” and can result in prescriptions for medication of questionable usefulness and that is not without risk in the event of minor changes..."
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#9There's a similar phenomenon when you look at fetal heart monitoring for otherwise healthy pregnant women going into labour. The two options are continuous monitoring, where the monitor is left in place for the entire hospital stay, and periodic monitoring, where a nurse installs it, takes a reading, and removes it about once an hour.
Common sense would dictate that negative outcomes are reduced with continuous monitoring, but it's actually the opposite, because the odds of the monitor detecting something in the intervening time and the intervention being correct are lower than the odds of the intervention causing some other unwanted side effect.
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#10[flagged]