Testing your health
By Edward Weinman
Doug and Suzy Moore became interested in preventative healthcare on a lark.
The charming couple from Lubbock, Texas, thought they didn’t need to worry about their health. Doug and Suzy felt fine. They looked good. They had no real complaints.
But one day, their local hospital began running ads for heart exams that measured calcification of the coronary arteries. The tests were offered much like a Green-Tag special, you know, buy one test get the other at half-price.
“Our family practitioner suggested we go,” said Doug Moore. “On a lark, we decided to give the test a try.”
The test revealed that both Doug and his wife Suzy had some calcification. Prudently, they made an appointment with a cardiologist.
“We were totally asymptomatic,” Suzy recalls. We had no issues so those calcification scores surprised us. We found out things were twisted a different way.”
This is when the Moores were introduced to Dr. Bradley Bale. Dr. Bale is the Medical Director of the Heart Attack Prevention Clinic in Spokane, Washington, and practices medicine with the Advanced Center for the Prevention of Heart Attack at the Covenant Heart and Vascular Institute in Lubbock. The Moores happened to attend one of Dr. Bale’s lectures on preventative care and certain things suddenly seemed to make sense.“We were impressed with Dr. Bale’s approach to prevention. We were both seeing a cardiologist and we were wondering why our cardiologist had never spoken to us before about these preventative issues.”
Dr. Bale’s approach to preventative medicine diverges from his contemporaries because Dr. Bale doesn’t chase numbers. For patients who are asymptomatic for heart disease, a healthcare provider might test for cholesterol. If the figures are high, the patient might be advised to take medication, but the problem with this approach is that some patients with high cholesterol will never get heart disease, while patients with low cholesterol might. Dr. Bale believes that the future of medicine lies in prevention, not in treating in-stage disease. And the key to prevention is structuring individualized clinical care.
The Moores needed no further persuasion. They made an appointment with Dr. Bale and, as Doug says, “Dr. Bale’s been working his preventative magic with us ever since.”
Part of the “magic” that Doug is referring to is the deCODEme genetic test, used by Dr. Bale to help him practice preventive care. deCODEme scans an individual’s DNA and currently measures risk for developing 36 different conditions, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and bladder cancer on a list that is continually being extended.
As Dr. Bale points out, it is very difficult to deduce from surface information whether an individual is likely to develop a medical condition. He describes a patient who eats right, exercises, is not overweight, and whose glucose scores were not abnormal. Most doctors would leave matters here. However, this patient, a farmer, took the deCODEme genetic test that revealed that he was predisposed to type 2 diabetes.
Despite his numbers being in normal ranges, “I could tell from his laboratory testing and his blood tests that he’s still moving toward diabetes despite his best lifestyle efforts,” Dr. Bale says.
Because of the patient’s genetic risk for the disease, Dr. Bale advised that this particular patient take medication to try and halt the progression toward type-2 diabetes in addition to continuing to maintain a healthy lifestyle, .
After hearing these types of preventative stories the Moores were ready to take the test that would unmask their health vulnerabilities. So were they scared at what the test might reveal?“There are two ways to practice health. Let things happen to you as they happen to you. That’s one course. Or, you can gain knowledge and try to understand what issues might effect your life and then take some action to have that turn out as best you can,” Doug says. “We’re not afraid of dying and don’t have hypersensitivity to those issues. But I think it’s prudent, frankly, to try to understand what your makeup is.”
The test results produced no definitive picture for the Moores but they did provide some helpful clues.
“My mother died from Alzheimer’s,” says Doug. “She had it for about ten years. Not a great worry of mine, but I wondered if I carried that gene.”
Interrupting, Suzy needles her husband with a barb: “Anytime he forgot something, I was wondering if he was going to have Alzheimer’s.”
Doug laughs at his own forgetfulness, and then reveals one of the positive aspects of the test. “I found out I was negative for that gene, so that has given me a great deal of comfort.”
The Moores are reminded that the deCODEme genetic test is not going to tell them they will get cancer or diabetes, or that they will never develop heart disease or run the risk of stroke. DeCODEme is a diagnostic tool to help assess inherent risk of 30 diseases, a tool that can point out the Moores’ vulnerabilities. For example, the test revealed that Doug had a high propensity for eye disorders like glaucoma. This clearly came as a surprise.
“I have really good eye sight. I’m 63 and I don’t wear glasses. So it was an eye opener,” he says, no pun intended. “This will change how I address my eye care. I’ll have more frequent visits to the ophthalmologist in the future.”
“And Doug’s ophthalmologist was happy to know this information,” Suzy chimes in, illustrating that another value of the deCODEme genetic test is that it connects doctor to patient, so together they can come up with a strategy to ward of diseases.
Because of the Moore’s new-found focus on preventative care, the couple has undergone a lifestyle makeover. They keep a regular exercise schedule. They read food labels. They even changed their diet.
“I threw away all the pizza coupons,” Suzy laughs. “That was one of our favorite foods. But we made a commitment to start eating right, stop eating pizza and burgers. We now eat chicken and fish and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables.”
Following Dr. Bale’s path to preventative care can help a patient fight disease before disease strikes. But a bonus to this lifestyle is that people like the Moores actually feel better.
“It’s one of those things that you don’t know what you don’t know,” explains Doug. “We didn’t know we could feel better because we thought we were healthy. But without a doubt, a healthy lifestyle and eating right does make a difference in how you feel.”
