Health update

[philmophlegm]

Everyone else does it, so for the first time ever, here is a post about my health! I had a medical for work on Monday, and they sent through the report yesterday.



I am 37 years old, 5'6" and 12 stones 10 pounds. I have been treated for epilepsy since I was 25.

I have a "fairly healthy lifestyle".

My diet is an area "where improvements could be made". "...high in animal fat with a lot of cheese". Yup.

Cholesterol / HDL ratio is in "the 2 times average risk range" mostly because I have a low level of HDL cholesterol.

BMI 28.7 (much the same as two years ago).
Body fat % 15.1 (down from 20.4 two years ago - so I'm doing something right!)
Waist-to-hip ratio 0.9 (improved slightly from 2008)
Nuffield Body Composition Index -1 (that's better than the recommended score - gotta be happy with that!)

Hydration level 68% (up significantly from 2008 - more junior staff in the office to bring me drinks all day...)

Blood pressure 122/84 (normal)

Cardiovascular risk score (Framingham method) 4% risk of cardiovascular event in next ten years. (Normal)

Lung function:
FVC 118% of predicted score (up from 110 two years ago)
FEV1 107% of predicted score
PEF 135% of predicted score
(which I think means I have healthier than average lungs).

Far vision without correction
Left eye B1
Right eye B1 (both down from A1 in 2008)

Near vision without correction
Left eye A1
Right eye A1

Haematology
HGB, WBC, RBC, HCT, MCV, MCH, MCHC, RDW, PLT (no idea what any of these mean, but they were all "within the reference range").

Clinical chemistry
UREA, CREA, ALB, PROT, BILI, ALK, AST, GGT, ALT, CA, CACO, GLU, HDL, TRIG all within reference range (HDL only just)
UA, CHOL, LDL, TCHR all higher than recopmmended norm.

Urine normal.

Posture score 3 - functional (improved from 2 in 2008).
Upright posture 3
Postural flexion 2
Postural skill 3

Resilience index (a measurement of heart rate variability)
1.5 sympathetic
0.0 parasympathetic

Current level of physical fitness 7.3 (at the top end of the normal zone, close to the 'athletic zone' - quite chuffed by that.)

Antioxidants
Just like two years ago, the clever antioxidant scanning machine couldn't get a reading off me. This "almost never happens", and usually only happens with builders etc with very calloused hands (certainly not like mine). Best explanation: I have "exceptionally luminescent skin".

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

I didn't realise I was taller than you! But you are certainly taller than Charles. :-)

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Most worrying of all was that I was 1cm shorter than in 2008. Then random pointed out to me that you lose height over the course of the day and I remembered that while this year's medical was at 2.45pm, last year's was at 10.00am.

Good job - I thought I was losing height at the rate of 0.5cm a year!

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

That would indeed have been scary!

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

I understand that gravity compresses the spine over the day. It explains why I've been measured at 5'10", 5'10 1/4" & 5'10 1/2". I'd be interested to try measuring myself both before and after I've had my spine adjusted by the chiropractor.

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

I was stunned the one time I measured in at 5'3", because it was 9am.

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

You healthy bugger you! ;)

[tovaglia.livejournal.com]

Antioxidants a whole load of quackery anyway

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

So I shouldn't worry about the lack of fruit and vegetables in my diet...?

Isn't BMI thought of as flawed nowadays too? I haven't got a clue and was just going on what the doctor said to me.

Do you know what the clinical chemistry abbreviations mean, or are they a code specific to Nuffield?

[tovaglia.livejournal.com]

For antioxidants see Ben Goldacre. I think fruit and/or veg are a good thing to have in one's diet, if only because it means one will hopefully thus eat less meat/salt, but there is zero evidence that this is due to the "antioxidants" in them.

Whereas BMI is "flawed" more in the sense that all health-related/biological measurements are "flawed" - one number can't possibly communicate the complexity that is inter-individual variation in humans, and should never be over-interpreted.

But you are right, BMI is less fashionable now than it was. It has obvious flaws. Less accurate at the extremes of height because of the way it's calculated, doesn't take account of variation in mass of non-adipose tissue (muscle, especially), and so on.

IMO BMI is useful once in the "medical" domain (eg That person is high risk for a general anaesthetic because they have a BMI of 35) but less useful within the "range of normal" of an ostensibly healthy population.

Mind you we are all getting fatter these days - very obvious looking at Jamie's library books that were illustrated in the 1970s, and comparing them with people now. It seems that in the 1970's, I (at my currrent weight)'d have been considered fat. Today, people think I am slim (ish).

Clin chem: urea creatinine albumin total protein bilirubin alk phos liver enzymes calcium corrected calcium glucose high-density lipoprotein triglyceride uric acid cholesterol low-density lipoprotein total cholesterol:HDL ratio.

Not standard abbreviations as such (except the liver enzymes and lipids, and urea which just means urea) but very easy to guess.

Nice to see the Nuffield keeping themselves in business. Since the reference range describes the middle 95% of the healthy population, then out of every 20 tests they do without any clinical indication, you'll expect on average one of them to turn out abnormal.

Hydration level, antioxidants.... (tovaglia snorts)

[tovaglia.livejournal.com]

Oh, mind you, there is pretty good evidence (EPIC-Norfolk study) that plasma vit C/folate levels is a powerful predictor of mortality.

But that, I think, is because it's strongly confounded by social class. Which they could find out a lot quicker by looking at your job title, presumably.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

If doctors can't agree on what's important, the rest of us have no chance...

I suppose ultimately the human body is just very complicated and maybe we should accept that research is always ongoing and is likely to throw up conflicting opinions.

[tovaglia.livejournal.com]

True; for many questions in health(care) there is never a definitive answer.

I guess my opinions just reflect my conviction of the value of (1) old-fashioned clinical skills - I think that a thorough history and physical examination is likely to yield much more meaningful clinical information than a whole load of "objective" laboratory or physiological scores without any context in which to interpret the results and (2) critical appraisal of the literature / evidence-based medicine.

You'd be hard pressed to find a [half decent] doctor who disagrees with either of those principles

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to stay with you on the science here. (Bear in mind I haven't done any science since GCSE, and I haven't done any biology since I was 14.) Is what is happening something like:

Someone has done a study that (for example) suggests something of a correlation between people who eat more than the average amount of stilton and people who get cancer of the little fingernail, and then extrapolated that to say that I (as an individual) should eat less stilton because "stilton has been shown to be a cause of fingernail cancer"?

That would be false logic along the lines of:
A and B are sometimes found together, therefore A is a cause of B.
I've ranted before on the subject of false logic. Is this anotber example?

[tovaglia.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly!

[lanciatore.livejournal.com]

I think that's being a bit ungenerous to longitudinal studies! It's not quite as simple as PP's analogy! And most scientists (and people conduction research on human nurition) are aware that correlation does not equal causation. But that never gets past the sub-editors on the national papers.

I think the benefits of fruit/veg in the diet are several and none have anything to do with antioxidants (so unanimity in the lanciatore/tovaglia household there!) -

1) vitamins that are not available from animal sources eg vitamins E & K
2) provides fibre which is beneficial for several reasons
3) v low in fat (if any at all) and it's unsaturated

anyway at least JOLF gives you a thorough checking over. I just get a lung function test once per year.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

The only thing I get through work is my eye tests paid for (and new glasses if I need them solely for VDU use).

However, my PJS does mean that I get biennial internal scans of all sorts, plus a standing instruction to go to the doctor with any "bump, lump, mass or oddity".

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

OT, but while in Cardiff, we looked round this building:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierhead_Building
which was built with brick and terracotta from Wrexham:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northeast/sites/wrexham/pages/ruabon.shtml