A research team from Shizuoka University of Social and Health Sciences, Tokyo University of Science, and Kyoto University Graduate School used medical big data that links specific health checkup records with medical institution consultation records to examine the impact of specific health checkups on the prevention of the onset of diabetes and high blood pressure.
The specific health checkup (commonly known as metabolic health checkup), which began in 2008, is an initiative to prevent the onset of lifestyle-related diseases related to obesity by focusing on abdominal obesity. However, from the design stage of the system until the present, the extent to which it is effective in preventing lifestyle-related diseases has not been verified in detail.
The research group used medical big data (mainly data from over 1,000 health insurance associations from companies) from a private data company that holds data on over 200 million people. They extracted people aged 40 to 74 who were eligible for the specific health checkup and had not been diagnosed with diabetes or high blood pressure, and followed them up by dividing them into those who had undergone the specific health checkup and those who had not. A total of 29 people were followed up for up to 3174 years (median 10 years) to evaluate the presence or absence of diabetes and high blood pressure.
As a result, the risk tended to be lower in those who had health checkups, at 10.6% compared to 11.4% for those who did not. Furthermore, after statistical adjustment for background factors, it was confirmed that those who had health checkups had a 0.90 times lower risk of developing diabetes and hypertension compared to those who did not (a 1.6% decrease in the rate). Further analyses, such as those evaluating diabetes and hypertension separately, showed similar trends.
The results of this study not only provide insight into the prevention of lifestyle-related diseases, but also could serve as basic information for the consideration of more effective health checkup systems in the future and for the nature of health checkups from a medical economic perspective.
Paper information:[JAMA Network Open] Universal Health Checkups and Risk of Incident Diabetes and Hypertension
