Healthcheck’s questionnaires – which can be completed separately or all at once – include questions about your body, your activity, your nutrition, and your mood. Based on your answers to these questions, Healthcheck builds your condition risk profile, accounting for how the information you provide on each risk component in the questionnaires (e.g. alcohol intake, smoking) is known to increase or decrease certain disease risks based on various relevant factors (e.g., family history, lifestyle factors).
The risk profile provided to you describes how your self-reported risk factors influence the estimated disease risk compared to known population averages for individuals of the same age and gender. However, your results are not personalized because there are other factors that may contribute to individual risk. If someone else enters the same answers as you, they will receive the same information, which does not account for unknown factors.
The comparative risk level information Healthcheck provides is a comparison of your statistical risk profile to the average statistical risk for individuals of the same age and gender. The average statistical risk provided is the chance that a given disease might, in purely statistical terms, develop over the next 5 years in a given population. For example, a risk of “3 in 1000” means that if 1000 people provided identical responses to questions related to a heart condition, 3 of them are statistically likely to develop that condition over the next 5 years.
A comparative risk that is higher than average does not necessarily suggest a “high” risk, but rather that the information provided suggests a higher statistical risk than other people of the same age and gender. For example, while family history of a disease and increased age are each likely to result in an increased absolute risk level, the increased age alone will not result in a higher comparative risk level. Please note that certain comparative risk level estimates may be more accurate than others.
Circumstances which may result in a less accurate comparative risk level may include, but are not limited to: the presence of long-term medical conditions or disabilities; risk factors of which you are unaware or not asked about; the provision of inaccurate information; a large combination of active risk factors; low disease occurrence; and variability of lifestyle and risk factors over time.