Doctor issues warning after sharing ‘exact age’ certain deadly diseases begin to appear
A doctor has revealed the age where life-threatening diseases begin to appear.
Dr Vonda Wright appeared as a guest on The Diary of a CEO podcast with host Steven Bartlett, where they talked about health and the average age you can expect to start developing potentially fatal diseases.
What is the average age people develop a serious health problem?
Bartlett spoke to the medical expert about his own research into the age where people are likely to begin developing fatal or life-altering diseases.
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Some of the diseases included chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), breast, lung and prostate cancers and heart disease.
After analysing data as well as the mortality rates for each disease, he revealed his findings: "62.94 years old is the exact age that on average, I'm going to get one of these [diseases]."
Dr Wright is an orthopaedic sports medicine surgeon, so it's fair to say that she might know a thing or two about human health.
She generally confirmed the accuracy of Bartlett's findings, though said it is a bit more broad than that.
She said: "Those are when they manifest, you may have them before then, maybe you never knew it.
"I have people say to me when I ask them their health history, 'What medical problems do you have?' And they're like, 'I don't have any'. Only because they've never been to a doctor.
"Or, maybe they've been diagnosed but they haven't gotten so bad that they're not spending three days a week in the doctor's office, or maybe they are sick."
What can we do about it?
Dr Wright said on the whole the mid-60s are when you're likely to start suffering from one of these life-changing illnesses and it corresponds to a certain age - retirement age.
"So just when you start thinking you have time to live the life that you envision, you're saddled with health problems that you have not taken care of," she revealed.
The doctor said that it highlights the importance of taking care of health issues early on, saying that your 40s are a crucial time for getting yourself in check and fix your lifestyle.
She urged people to correct themselves in these years, as you have from the ages of 40-63 to put yourself in good stead.
However, if you wait until 63, 'it is much, much, much harder', she said.
Dr Wright's medical work centres around creating a new approach to aging, making her the right person to talk about the subject.
"[It's] to not only take care of people in my middle-aged demographic, but to really get to my millennial children and my millennial nieces and nephews and say, 'You have so much control of your health if you just look up and pay attention'," she added.
Though you can start healthy habits in your 40s, the health expert said that it crucially begins in your childhood, and what your parents teach you.
"I hear parents a lot of times who say, 'Oh, my kid won't eat this or that' and 'I can't get my kid to do anything'," she began.
"I'm not scolding them in the way that I'm about to respond, I get it, I'm the mother of a family of six blended children, but here's what I know... children learn from what they see.
"The time to begin is when our children are little."
Basically, if you try to maintain a healthy lifestyle as early as you can in your life, your chances of contracting deadly disease later down the line goes down.
Joshua Nair