Assess Your Risk of Serious Disease in Minutes

A Harvard site that lets you calculate your risk of developing major health problems is "one of the best health-oriented sites on the Web," according to a Wall Street Journal columnist.

The WSJ's Tara Parker-Pope featured yourdiseaserisk.com in her Health Journal column today (WSJ sub required). It's run by Harvard's Center for Cancer Prevention, but goes beyond cancers to assesses risk for heart disease, stroke, diabetes and osteoporosis as well.

Parker-Pope explains why she feels the Harvard site is superior to most of its competition:

The site goes beyond the standard questions about age, cholesterol and family history and explores the variety of lifestyle choices, environmental issues and other factors that can influence health risk. ...

... At the end of the survey, the site creates a color-coded graphic showing how your risk stacks up against the rest of the population. But the best thing about yourdiseaserisk.com is the next step -- a customized action plan showing how you can alter your risk through lifestyle changes, such as increasing vegetable consumption, exercising more, taking calcium supplements or a multivitamin, stopping smoking or changing alcohol habits.

The risk factors were developed using what sounds like a reasonably rigorous process.

If you visit the site you'll find that once you start the process you have to choose which of five problems you want examined: cancer, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, and stroke. Then, within cancer, you choose which one of 12 types you want to be assessed for.

Once you've focused on a specific issue, the process is fast. There are only a few questions -- for prostate cancer, just nine. The site reported that I have a below average risk, but should eat more tomato-based foods, and that after 50 I should get screened regularly.

My only complaint is that you have to focus on a specific disease in order to have your risk analyzed. If you want to look at your risk for several different problems, you have to go through a different survey each time. Admittedly, they're fast, but it feels inefficient.

Someone willing to devote a little more time to the process would probably want to take a one-stop questionnaire that intelligently zeroed in on potential problem areas. Version 2.0, perhaps?

Otherwise, kudos to the Harvard School of Public Health for the solution-based approach.

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As of Tuesday afternoon Pacific time, the Harvard site is intermittently down due to the traffic the WSJ piece generated -- and when you're there, it's slow. You may want to wait a day or so before checking it out.