Jules Renard, the French author, said, “It is not a question of how old you are, but a question of how you are old.” We cannot control aging but how do we prevent it before time? Before we delve into understanding how preventive healthcare is the new form of anti-aging, let’s try to comprehend what causes us to age.

A study published on NCBI by Stefan Liochev, a scholar from Duke University Medical Centre in the United States, states “The causes of aging synergize with each other”. The study also states that aging is a result of damage to cells, tissues, and organs that leads to the development of pathological conditions and eventually, death. According to Medical News Today, the damage is a result of several factors like environmental, psychological, poor diet, stress, etc.

Johnny Bowden, the nutritionist, and best-selling author told U.S. News that only 5–10% of our aging process is related to our genes. The rest is how we treat our bodies. He states that four causes of aging are dependent on free radicals, inflammation, stress, and too much sugar.

But how do we determine things like the level of inflammation or the amount of sugar in our bodies? It’s possible through preventive healthcare. Cheaper than curative healthcare, preventive healthcare allows knowing what is going on with our bodies. For example, too much sugar shows up in blood tests while stress tests determine whether an individual is too stressed. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies play a huge role in determining the functioning of our bodies can also help prevent some diseases, or get them diagnosed in the nascent stage.

Aging leads to diseases. Diseases lead to death. Preventive healthcare can slow down the aging of the cells. Aging doesn’t necessarily mean an increase in the number of years you have lived. It also means the age of your body and how healthy your body is. Two people who are 30 years old may have a different body age and different fitness levels. Death happens after the biological aging of the body. But through preventive healthcare, it can be slowed to the normal pace, reducing the number of preventable deaths in the world.

Preventive healthcare spans across tests, screenings, regular checkups, lifestyle changes, immunizations, counselling, etc. This includes not only the physiological aspects but also the psychological ones as stress is one of the leading causes of aging. It analyzes what influences a person’s health through biostatistics and epidemiology.

Even the smallest change in your body (biological aging) can show up in the preventive medical tests. This enables the diagnosis and treatment of several aging-related diseases like cancer and ultimately contributes to having a longer lifespan and enhancing the quality of life.

The best hack for anti-aging is preventive healthcare. Know what’s going on with your body and treat it before it overpowers your bodily functions. Stay one step ahead!

“This article is exclusively produced for The Times of India Healthy India, Fit India initiative by our partner, Healthians to spread awareness on the importance of preventive health care”

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Blood pressure is the pressure of circulating blood against the walls of blood vessels. It is one of our main vital signs and one of the most commonly monitored variables in all types of medical check-ups, in triage before admission to hospital, etc., and is an especially informative parameter of the general condition of a patient. Blood pressure varies greatly from one individual to another, is subject to circadian rhythms, and is affected by stress, nutritional factors, medication intake and disease. It is a universally understood measure, and is essential from a clinical point of view. In addition, high blood pressure increases the risk of heart attack and strokes, while lower blood pressure is seen as positive.

In terms of health monitoring, a key element in the transition toward preventive health systems, accurate and continual monitoring of blood pressure is widely seen as a fundamental parameter. Knowing a patient’s heart rate, at a time when more and more people are using wearables such as the Apple Watch, which provide continuous recording through photoplethysmography or even a pretty reliable electrocardiogram, is certainly useful, but more important is being able to combine that information with other parameters. Talking to cardiologists, the parameter they all say is most useful for diagnoses, besides heart rhythm, is blood pressure.

Now, a group of researchers from the University of Toronto have come up with a way to measure blood pressure accurately using a smartphone camera and a procedure similar to taking a selfie. The measurement is carried out by transdermal optical imaging: the light emitted by the smartphone camera bounces off the proteins near the surface of the skin at different speeds, allowing a minimal measurement of changes in hemoglobin, which with a battery of 900 images taken in 30 seconds provides an accurate blood pressure reading.

It’s not clear yet whether the procedure works for all skin types, which is important given the higher incidence of high blood pressure and associated mortality in black people, but the idea, without a doubt, has potential, because dedicating thirty seconds a day to taking one’s blood pressure is not difficult and could help detect numerous health problems early. In addition, regardless of whether something is detected or not, the information collected could, if shared, feed numerous studies and contribute to the advancement of medical science as a whole.

Wearables of various types that record our vital parameters, beds that monitor our sleep, simple but precise analytics that replace checks we used to carry out once a year or less, and artificial intelligence to process all these data are just some of the elements that will radically alter healthcare in the coming years, based on a pro-active approach rather than waiting until we fall sick. This type of innovation and its possibilities, both for research and medical practice, have to be introduced into university programs as soon as possible if we want to see a real change in the mentality of health practitioners.

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