In this blog for people interested in changing to a healthy lifestyle Robert Walton, a general practitioner, looks at new ways of showing your riskA way of expressing the chance of an event taking place, expressed as the number of events divided by the total number of observations or people. It can be stated as ‘the chance of falling were one in four’ (1/4 = 25%). This measure is good no matter the incidence of events i.e. common or infrequent. of developing common illnesses.
Page last reviewed: 05 April 2023.
About the only thing I can say in Chinese is “How old are you?”. Now you could be forgiven for thinking that the answer would be fairly precise and easy to understand – although my linguistic skills have not stretched that far yet!
Well it’s work in progress….
But cutting-edge thinking is that both this question and the answer can be much more complex than they may at first sight appear. There is now a plethora of calculators which allow you to estimate the age separately of all the individual organs in your body! For example Public Health England launched a website which will give you your ‘heart age’ by comparing your profile to those of other people with similar blood pressure, cholesterol and other risk factors. The calculator will then give you your ‘effective heart age’ which is that of a healthy person with the same profile as your own (Spiegelhalter 2016). So if your ‘real’ heart age is 60 and your effective heart age is 49 then you might be very happy, but if it is 73 you might have some cause for concern!
The same argument applies to other organs and systems of the body such as your lungs or your metabolism. Whilst there is considerable variation in the scientific backing for some of these calculations and their value in mainstream healthcare has been called into question (McCartney 2018) these estimates of effective age could be a clearer way of conveying your overall risk of developing than ones that have been used so far. Thus an important question might be ‘If your effective age is higher than your actual age would you be motivated to change your lifestyle to improve your health?’.
Essentially your effective age is a compilation of your risk factors for a particular illness.
Quitting smoking and risk assessment
So a recent Cochrane Review examined whether giving people an assessment of their risk disease might act as a motivator to help people to stop smoking (Clair et al 2019) . The results show a lack of high quality evidence on whether feeding back risk information can help people to quit tobacco. Overall there were 20 trialsClinical trials are research studies involving people who use healthcare services. They often compare a new or different treatment with the best treatment currently available. This is to test whether the new or different treatment is safe, effective and any better than what is currently used. No matter how promising a new treatment may appear during tests in a laboratory, it must go through clinical trials before its benefits and risks can really be known. with nearly 10,000 participants examining feeding back the results of various biomedical tests to people who were smoking and looking at rates of quitting. Disappointingly the review concluded that there was no evidence that feedback of risk generally had any effect on subsequent smoking behaviour. This finding applied to studies of several different types including those that gave feedback on smoking exposure, smoking related risk and harm from smoking tobacco.
Only two studies included in the review looked at feeding back the risk factors in the form of lung age and then measured subsequent smoking cessation. In one trial in general practice in the UK, participants had their lung function measured and then a computer software system estimated their lung age which was fed back to the participants if it was higher than their chronological age (Parkes et al 2008). This trial showed an increase in the smoking cessation rateThe speed or frequency of occurrence of an event, usually expressed with respect to time. For instance, a mortality rate might be the number of deaths per year, per 100,000 people. at 12 months from 6.4% to 13.6%. The other trial in people having problems with substance use was much smaller – only 50 people – and the estimate of the effect was therefore less precise and the results showed no evidence of any benefit (Drummond et al 2014).
So while feeding back a ‘risk assessment’ may not be of any great help to you in changing your lifestyle, feedback in terms of the effective age of your lungs might be effective in motivating you to stop.
Oh and in case you are still wondering 你几岁!
Join in the conversation on Twitter with @rtwalton123 @CochraneUK @CochraneTAG or leave a comment on the blog.
Dr. Walton reports grants from NIHR Health Technology Asessment, grants from NIHR Programme Grants for Applied Research, other from TTS Pharma, outside the submitted work; In addition, Dr. Walton has a patent WALTON R, MCKINNEY E, MARSHALL S, MURPHY M, WELSH K, others. GENETIC INDICATORS OF TOBACCO CONSUMPTION. Patent number: 2001038567. Filed date: 24 Nov 2000. Publication date: 01 Jun 2001 with royalties paid to gNostics.
This is a really useful exercise and I also found other methods highlighting real personal effects very useful when I was involved in smoking cessation for young people. We showed videos showing the mock up of young girls skin ageing earlier due to smoking (very effective for the girls) and the videos whIch showed the effects on blood vessel constriction, and so limb health, caused by a smoking twin versus a non-smoking twin’s hand recovering from cold stress. These stark visuals and personal data seem to have a more profound effect on resolve to quit than non-personal or theoretical evidence of the effects of smoking.