Health screening for diseases like diabetes, colon cancer, breast cancer and heart disease is a concern for everyone. There is currently a worldwide epidemic of obesity in countries where the population has some wealth.
Screening for cancer is just one type of screening tool doctors use to help prevent cancer deaths by finding the cancer early or determining who is at risk for cancer. The American Cancer Society is perhaps the best place to look for the most current guidelines and recommendation. The screening recommendations are for healthy people who have no increased risk due to things like genetics, for example.
A total of seventeen children were brought to their local hospital recently following bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. What makes this situation so unusual is that it was no virus or bacterium causing their illness but something they received after playing with a toy they had recently bought at a school fair.
The American Heart Association has identified seven simple guidelines for keeping your life healthy and staving off heart disease. Are they that simple and can you achieve them? Some of them are life choices you may already have made for yourself. Others you might have to work at in order to get what you want out of them in order to have a healthy heart. Let’s look at the seven simple rules (the “Simple 7”) to see if they are something you can manage or not.
Eat a healthier diet. You should eat plenty of fruits and vegetables so that your blood pressure is kept low and your weight is lower. Fruits and vegetables contain healthy antioxidants which can help your heart. You should eat fish about twice a week and choose only lean proteins in the meats you choose. Use fat free or low fat products when available and drink fat free milk. Make sure to stay away from saturated fats and trans fats, which aren’t good for your health.
Quit Smoking. Smoking is perhaps the most preventable cause of early death in the world. You have a higher risk of clogged arteries, strokes, heart attacks, other heart disease and cancers of many kinds if you continue to smoke. If you are a smoker, get professional help to become a non-smoker for good.
Exercise. Get as little as thirty minutes a day of moderate exercise like biking, walking, running, swimming or playing games like racquetball or tennis. This can keep your body lean and can prevent heart disease. By exercising your heart, it will work better and can prevent clogged arteries.
Keep your Cholesterol down. This may mean that you take one of the statin drugs available for lowering cholesterol. You should have a cholesterol level of less than 200 mg/dL. You can also eat foods low in cholesterol and stay away from trans fats and saturated fats.
Lose weight. Being overweight has recently been identified as an independent risk factor for heart disease. If you eat better and exercise daily, you should lose the weight easier and can be of a normal weight.
Keep your Blood Pressure down. Hypertension is the greatest risk factor for heart disease. If you cannot control your blood pressure, you should know that this can be deadly.
Watch your blood sugar. Those with diabetes or glucose intolerance have a higher risk for heart disease. In fact, the risk is two to four times that of people with normal blood sugar. This may mean you need to be treated with anti-diabetic medication and that you watch your sugar intake.
Screening for health concerns in women can be confusing. Tests you take when you’re forty are different from the tests you take when you’re twenty. Either way, health screening is important and it’s a good idea to know what health tests you should be having at different ages in your life.
When we think of healthcare screening, we think of pap tests and mammograms—both uniquely female screening tests. Men, on the other hand, are not frequent flyers to the doctor’s office, especially for things like screening tests. And yet there are screening tests for men that can save lives and prevent disease sooner than the disease would otherwise be found.
One test young men consistently overlook is the testicular examination. Men should do a testicular self exam every month beginning at the age of fifteen. The disease isn’t common in teenagers but becomes more common when a man reaches the ages of 20-35. If you feel anything abnormal, you should see your doctor immediately. Testicular cancer feels like a rock hard lump in the testicle.
Do the testicular exam after a hot shower or bath, when the scrotum is looser and softer. Do one testicle at a time by rolling the testicle between your fingers slowly. The epididymis is the softer sac behind the testicle and represents a normal lump you’ll feel. The right testicle (usually) is bigger than the left testicle so don’t worry about that.
If a lump is found, usually a biopsy is done to see if it is cancerous. If you have a cancerous tumor of the testicle, the testicle is removed and sometimes radiation or chemotherapy is done. Testicular cancer is highly treatable if you catch it early and this is why the testicular self exam is so important.
Men also need prostate cancer screening. This is a different age of men altogether. Prostate screening is done after a man reaches fifty, although it can be done sooner if a man has a strong family history of prostate cancer. This involves having a digital rectal exam. This kind of exam feels the back of the prostate, which abuts against the anterior rectal wall. You can feel it during an anal exam.
Prostate cancer feels like nodules on the prostate or it feels like one lobe of the prostate is markedly bigger than the other. A prostate exam doesn’t find all cancers of the prostate, especially those that are very deep inside the prostate. For this reason some doctors also do a PSA exam.
A PSA test stands for prostate specific antigen test. This is a blood test that checks for the presence of prostate specific antigen in the blood. The PSA goes up markedly in some prostate cancers. It also increases modestly in cases of benign prostatic hypertrophy or enlarged prostate conditions.
The problem is that not all prostate exams pick up prostate cancer and not all prostate cancers will reveal a high PSA. This is why both tests need to be done to screen for prostate cancer.
Breast cancer screening for women has been the number one reason why fewer and fewer women are dying of breast cancer over the past several years. While more than 286,000 are diagnosed with cancer in a given year, only 41,000 of these women will die of the disease. In fact the rates of death from breast cancer have been decreasing since 1990. This is especially true for women under the age of 50, for whom there has been an emphasis on screening mammograms. Treatment has gotten better as well.
Many health screening recommendations by large health agencies recommend having healthcare screening by age forty, sooner if you have a family history of a disease. This is because the traditional diseases of “the aged” actually begin in the 40s and this is a time when the stressors of a bad lifestyle, a difficult life and bad eating habits begin to take their toll on those most at risk.
By the age of forty, you should have a regular doctor and have annual or biannual checkups to check for diseases like cancer and heart disease. You should also have an identifiable dentist to whom you should go for semi-annual checkups and teeth cleaning. Heart disease is one disease that doctors is related to periodontal disease so having your teeth checked regularly makes sense.
Women begin to get some return out of having regular mammograms by age forty so this is a time for annual mammograms along with pelvic exams, Pap tests and tests for thyroid disease, high cholesterol and diabetes. Men should have an annual testicular exam. It’s a disease of young men and just checking yourself is not enough. A testicular exam should be a part of every physical you get. It’s treatable when caught early so there should be no excuse not to get one.
Your metabolic rate is not the same at age forty than it was at age 25. You begin to gain weight on the same number of calories you used to eat. This means that paying attention to what you eat and starting or continuing an exercise program is key to making your body look and feel healthy throughout your forties and beyond. Diets should be high in organically-produced foods and low in processed, sugar-containing and salt-containing foodstuffs.
Be aware of the stress put on your body by things like alcohol intake and sleep deprivation. Both put your body at increased stress and do nothing to prevent disease and keep your body healthy. Rest to the body reduces your cravings for sweets and high fat foods so you need to take sleep seriously. Failing to do so can lead to high cholesterol, hypertension and high blood sugar—in short, diabetes.
It should be your gift to yourself and a routine to get regular checkups with testing for diabetes, heart disease and cholesterol screening. Screening for breast cancer should be a woman’s annual event. Both men and women are at increased risk of getting diabetes after age forty, so a Hemoglobin A1C or a fasting blood sugar should be a routine part of all your physical examinations.
As you age, there will be more screening tests added to the list of recommendations. Just remember that these tests are designed to prevent severe disease in people and to save both you and the insurance company the hassle of trying to cure a serious disease.
Because millions of people are dying in Sub-Saharan Africa from diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, there is little or no attention paid to the most common cancer to hit women in these areas—cervical cancer. Healthcare in these areas, particularly in Sierra Leone, are nonexistent. There is no healthcare screening so women who have cervical cancer come too late for any surgical intervention against the disease. There are also no radiotherapy machines in the country so that if you get cervical cancer, you basically die from it.
Increasingly, however, we have come to the conclusion that cervical cancer is, for the most part, preventable through the use of cervical cancer vaccines that protect women from contracting human papilloma virus, the virus that is known to contribute to getting cervical cancer. HPV disease is rampant in Sierra Leone and women, who often marry young and have many children, have no access to life saving cancer screening and cancer prevention through the HPV exam or even pap tests.
Currently, there has been a link between Wales, the UK in general and the country of Sierra Leone to offer means of preventing this type of cancer, which kills between 11,000 and 24,000 women per year. That link will provide lifesaving vaccine and cervical cancer detection so that the disease is caught earlier and hopefully won’t lead to death.
Women in Africa who die from cervical cancer are generally in their 40s with families to care for. The cervical cancer is debilitating to the woman, harmful to her family and ultimately leads to her death from cancer. With adequate health screening and the use of HPV vaccinations, thousands of lives could be saved. The issue with the vaccination is money, which costs up to a hundred dollars or more for the three doses necessary to get the vaccination. But that’s where ties in Wales and the UK come in. Hopefully, deals could be made with the manufacturer of the HPV vaccine so that there could be cheap vaccine available to women in Africa.
This may be better than considering increasing screening for HPV through PAP tests and special tests for HPV. Women who are positive for HPV or cervical cancer would still have to go through surgery or other medical techniques that just don’t exist in Sierra Leone. Time will tell to see if this connection proves to help these women survive this deadly disease.
A lot of emphasis is placed on health checks for women—on mammograms, Pap tests and the like. But men also need health screening and have certain types of health screening that are unique to them. Men tend not to see doctors unless they are ill and there are many diseases of men in particular that can be prevented or treated early if the proper health screening is done.
Men do not live as long as women—as many as six years less than a woman. It is believed that stress plays a factor in this phenomenon as well as their lack of routine healthcare. And yet, conditions such as diabetes, obesity, cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease and prostate disease can be problems of younger men as well as older men.
What kinds of screening do men need? First of all, they need a general physical exam to detect the presence of heart murmurs, lung disease and high blood pressure, also called hypertension. Older men need to have digital rectal exams for prostatic hypertrophy or prostate cancer. A Prostate Specific Antigen or PSA is recommended as a screening test for prostate cancer by some doctors.
Men are good candidates for cardiovascular screening in the form of a resting ECG and a cardiac stress test. A stress test tells us whether or not the heart is undergoing stress during exercise and is an excellent way to pick up latent heart disease. Most doctors don’t recommend them routinely but men with strong family histories of heart disease, diabetes or symptoms suggestive of heart disease should definitely have cardiac stress tests at periodic intervals in their lives.
Men need cholesterol screening. Such screening tends to give the total cholesterol, the “good cholesterol”, the “bad” cholesterol and the triglyceride level. A high triglyceride level can be seen in metabolic syndrome, a disease where a person has insulin resistance, high blood pressure, obesity and a higher risk of heart disease. A cholesterol reading can also tell if you are at risk for heart disease by virtue of having a low “good” cholesterol reading and an elevated “bad” cholesterol. This test may decide who goes on medications such as Lipitor and simvastatin, which lower the cholesterol levels.
There are screening tests for colon cancer as well. It is recommended that all men after the age of 50 have a routine colonoscopy to check for evidence of colonic polyps. Such polyps can be removed at the time of the colonoscopy and can be checked for evidence of pre-cancer of the colon.
It is time for men to step up and recognize that they have just as high a propensity for chronic disease as do women. Regular routine checkups are recommended for all ages of men and especially for men past the age of 40 years.
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