HealthScreen

HealthScreen on Sunrise this morning ‘Secret to Living Longer’ Longevity is not possible without Health Screening. I had the privilege of being interviewed on Sunrise this morning to provide some insights into Preventative Health.

This story was published today in The Australian WISH magazine What a $3000 ‘longevity’ health assessment actually tells you… The old question of if you were given a box containing the exact date of your death, would you open it has now become: how much are you prepared to pay for the privilege? By ELLE HALLIWELL This full story appears in the February issue of WISH Magazine, on sale Friday February 2 inside The Australian: For Dr David Badov, medical director of Melbourne preventative medical clinic HealthScreen, identifying issues before they become symptomatic can have profound positive implications for a person’s life expectancy. “Unfortunately there are very few of us who die of ‘old age’,” Badov says. “It is usually heart disease, stroke or cancer that cuts our lives short. “So if we can screen, pick up these conditions much earlier and implement changes, then this will change the individual’s life expectancy.” He cites “first stage lung cancers, kidney and thyroid cancers, brain aneurysms, and many other potential ‘time bombs’,” as some of the early stage, asymptomatic diseases picked up during the clinic’s extensive screening program, which Badov describes as a “one-stop shop”. Undergoing a privately funded MRI scan is the health equivalent of a luxury fashion purchase. An initial assessment, which costs $2950 and includes consultations with physicians and advanced investigations such as a skin cancer check, ECG, blood tests and advanced imaging, can take about four hours. At the two-week follow-up appointment, patients will also be talked through the results of genetic tests (“for 147 genes involved in heart disease and cancer”), a sleep study, biological age test, respiratory function tests and mental health assessment, which Badov explains “will provide a comprehensive and holistic assessment” of a patient’s overall health. And on occasion these investigations do reveal something sinister. “It is psychologically difficult both on the practitioner as well as obviously the patient,” Badov says. But the upside to early detection of an illness is the likelihood that it can be more easily treated, something the Centaurus HealthCare executive chairman says can make it “easier to put a positive spin on”. Badov believes we are going to see “more and more” preventative tests such as genetic screening used in the future as people take a more proactive approach to their wellbeing. “The implications of course are that one has to be prepared for the consequences of such potentially positive genetic tests, and ramifications for the future, and therefore it is important that appropriate counselling is provided before the test is performed,” he says. Is undergoing a full body MRI scan a new sign of wealth?