Online tools for working out the risk of individual diseases are almost as old as the internet. The web is full of sites devoted to assessing people's risk of cardiovascular disease, for example. But now the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention (part of Harvard School of Public Health) has produced a site designed to calculate the risk of five of the most important disease groups in the United States.
Launched last month, Your Disease Risk (www.yourdiseaserisk.harvard.edu) is an expanded version of the centre's cancer risk assessment website; in addition to the 12 cancers covered in the original site, it now also includes heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and osteoporosis.
The site is an interactive educational tool that seeks to encourage healthy lifestyles, making a quick and dirty assessment of people's eating, drinking, and exercise habits, and offering personalised tips for disease prevention. Visitors choose their “disease,” fill in an online questionnaire, and, assuming they don't lie, they should get a clear picture of their chances of being fit or sick in the future—or so the site claims.
The site began in the mid-1990s as a pen and paper risk assessment tool, and gradually evolved to its present format. Its contributors—epidemiologists, clinicians, and others from the Harvard medical community—identified established and probable risk factors for each disease based on the available scientific evidence. “This information was then used to develop calculations that generate a person's risk of disease compared to population averages by age and sex,” the site explains.
Your Disease Risk is extremely clear and user friendly. With quick links to other educational information from Harvard University, it is a serious attempt to guide people through the intricate world of disease prevention.
Naturally the media have already dubbed the site a “hypochondriac's dream,” but if the hits received by its predecessor site are anything to go by, there must a lot of hypochondriacs out there: Your Cancer Risk, launched in 2000, has averaged 900 to 1000 unique visitors daily for the past four years, making it Harvard School of Public Health's most successful website.