Wall Street Journal

HEALTH JOURNAL

By TARA PARKER-POPE

 

 

Web Site Tallies Your Risk
Of Disease And Tells You
What You Can Do About It
October 31, 2006

 

Everybody worries about cancer, heart disease and other illnesses, but most people don't have any idea what their long-term risk for developing a serious health problem really is.

The best place to find out is a Web site called www.yourdiseaserisk.com. The site, created by the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention, stands out as one of the best health-oriented sites on the Web. Most Internet sites give users general health information, but the Harvard site has found a way to provide customized information to help patients better understand their personal health and risk for disease. More important, it also spits out a tailored action plan on ways to lower risk for health problems. It does all this using colorful graphics and charts that allow users to grasp how their health stacks up against the rest of the population and how small changes in lifestyle can lower their health risks.

"We started this because people didn't appear to understand how much of cancer or other diseases can be prevented with changes in lifestyle," says Harvard professor Graham Colditz, director of the cancer prevention center and founder of the site. "We're giving you an individualized assessment of what you can do."

Other Web sites offer calculators to help users assess their risk for various health problems. The American Heart Association, for instance, offers a short quiz to help determine your 10-year risk of heart attack. But the calculator isn't easy to find. Go to www.americanheart.org and type "heart attack risk assessment" in the search box. But unlike the Harvard Web site, the heart association calculator just focuses on basic statistics like cholesterol and blood pressure, and doesn't factor in healthful behaviors like exercise, fruit and vegetable intake, and regular wine consumption.

Another site, www.cancer.gov/bcrisktool from the National Cancer Institute, allows women to calculate their risk for breast cancer. I like this site because it gives a woman her actual risk rather than using scary-sounding relative-risk percentages. For instance, a 60-year-old woman who had children after the age of 30 and whose own mother had breast cancer has a 44% higher risk of getting breast cancer than the average 60-year-old. But this site puts those numbers in perspective, showing her real risk of getting breast cancer in five years is just 2.6%, compared with the 1.8% risk faced by the average 60-year-old woman. But again, the downside of the NCI calculator is that it uses only a few basic questions and doesn't include the variety of factors that influence breast-cancer risk.