Would you dare take the highly detailed health check that could predict your risk of 10 deadly diseases 'with 70 per cent accuracy'?

Health MOT data could be used to foresee various illnesses years in advance  

Routine NHS health checks could be used to foresee patients' risk of dementia and nine other deadly diseases with 70 per cent accuracy, a study suggests.

Researchers used information already collected at the free screening sessions to predict what conditions patients would suffer over the next 10 years.

Experts claim such warnings could provide earlier diagnosis and treatment, helping people avoid serious health problems and also reduce pressure on NHS services.

Illnesses predicted by the data included heart attacks, heart failure, stroke, atrial fibrillation – which causes irregular and abnormally fast heartbeat – chronic kidney disease, fatty liver disease, alcoholic liver disease, liver cirrhosis and liver failure.

The NHS Health Check is offered at GP surgeries every five years to people aged 40 to 74 who don’t have any pre-existing conditions in a bid to spot conditions early.

The 10 diseases that could be predicted from NHS health check data, with the accuracy rate of each

Free NHS health checks are offered to over-40s who don't have any pre-existing medical conditions (stock image)

Healthcare professionals usually do a few health tests and ask questions about a patient's family history and lifestyle.

Checks, which take 20 to 30 minutes, record age, gender, ethnicity, height, weight, waist size, blood pressure, cholesterol and sometimes blood sugar.

Patients are also asked whether any of their close relatives have had any medical conditions that could indicate a family history of disease, if they smoke and drink if so how much, and how much exercise they regularly do.

This data is used to give an indication of their heart health and how at-risk they are of developing heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease and stroke.

But academics at Oxford University, who analysed data from 228,240 adults in the most recent study, believe it could be doing a lot more.

Researcher Celeste McCracken, of Oxford, said: ‘These data shows that it is possible to derive decent multiorgan risk estimates from information that can be collected remotely.

‘We understand the NHS is resource-constrained, and this could have huge implications for people in hard-to-reach places.’

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Researchers said the assessment could be carried out ‘without the need for specialist computing or invasive biomarkers’.

They added: ‘Such an approach could increase the utility of existing data and place multiorgan risk information at the fingertips of primary care providers, thus creating opportunities for longer term multimorbidity prevention.’

Ms McCracken added: ‘Our findings suggest that primary care providers could use a single set of easily collected information to simultaneously generate multiple disease risk scores.

‘This could significantly streamline the process, potentially improving early disease detection and prevention efforts.’

Data collected at the screening sessions could be used to accurately predict many more illnesses than it's currently used for, say researchers

Researchers analysed information collected at patients’ NHS health check appointments and made predictions about conditions each person would come down with.

They then assessed their accuracy by comparing their predictions against actual data on those individuals held by UK Biobank.

Accuracy of risk scores produced in the study were 73 per cent for stroke, 82 per cent for all-cause dementia, 79 per cent for heart attacks, 78 per cent for atrial fibrillation and 83 per cent for heart failure.

For conditions involving other organs experts successfully predicted  77 per cent of cases of chronic kidney disease, 77 per cent for fatty liver disease, 86 per cent for alcoholic liver disease, 76 per cent for liver cirrhosis and 75 per cent for liver failure.

However, the team said additional work is needed to determine if the findings, published in the BMJ Evidence-based Medicine, would hold in a larger cohort outside of the UK Biobank.