Assessing risks to your longevity

‘Budget’ pathway (low cost, more effort)

In the previous step, you undertook a comprehensive exercise in identifying your longevity risks.

Since you’ve chosen the “Budget” pathway, this was achieved with a combination of family medical history and a free online questionnaire.

Side Note: even with these high quality free tools, you still could be overlooking a key risk area, and might want to consider at least checking out the “Balanced” pathway, where we discuss the benefits of a low cost genetic tests.

Now that you’ve identified areas of elevated longevity risk, you are now ready to complete a risk assessment for each of your major findings.

We can begin that next step using a longevity risk management plan document, which we prepared for you.

Download it here:

Get the Plan

If you need extra pages, download those here

Getting Started with Longevity Risk Assessment

Estimated Time: 90 minutes

Cost: $0

Using this document will be a learning exercise for you, but we do promise it will become quite powerful once you get the hang of it.

Plus, you’ve chosen the ‘Budget’ pathway, so you’re exchanging your hard effort for less monetary cost, right?

Upon completion of this exercise, you’ll emerge with clear longevity priority areas where taking action is important.

You’ll use these priority areas to propel your personal research as well as start a conversation with your healthcare providers.

For starters, you’re going to select 2-3x diseases for which you found evidence of increased likelihood and for which you know the potential consequence.

You will add these risk to the first column, one for each row.

The risk is one of the disease states you listed and the source is where that risk comes from (e.g. ‘Siteman questionnaire’, or ‘family history’).

Helpful example #1: FAMILY HISTORY OF HEART ATTACK

For our first example, we will draw from the family medical history exercise, from a fictional user name Frank.

Frank is a 60 year old male of caucasian ethnicity.

Family medical history - example of heart attack in the father.

In this example, his father had a heart attack at age 59, and received a stent as a result. He was known to have high blood pressure since his early 40s.

The presence of this heart attack indicates Frank is has an elevated probability of suffering from heart disease.

A heart attack (as well as cardiovascular disease more broadly) is therefore a longevity risk that must be managed.

Step 1: Entering the **Longevity Risk** into the form for the above example

Step 1: List the Longevity Risk

Frank lists this information in the first column (see example image).

Now we must consider the potential consequence from this risk.

While Frank’s father was rushed to the ER 20 minutes down the road and received a stent to open the blockage - we could consider him very fortunate.

In fact, the life-saving procedure he underwent was in itself a form of risk management - we have emergency room doctors on call to handle such scenarios.

step 2: List the consequence

For Frank, the potential consequence of a heart attack is very much life & death. We want to avoid this if at all possible!

Step 3: Determine a Consequence Category

Tip: Where in doubt, you should list a reasonable ‘worst case’ scenario for the consequence to properly represent the longevity risk.

Step 3: Choose a Consequence Category

In risk management, consequences have categories. In longevity risk management, these categories are:

Minor (no real risk to healthspan or lifespan)
Moderate (possible impacts to healthspan)
Major (healthspan impacts, possibly lifespan impacts)
Severe (lifespan impacts)

For Frank, with the family history of heart attack at a relatively young age, the consequence category could arguably be either Major or Severe.

Step 4: Choose a Likelihood Category

Paired results for the example user, from the “Your Disease Risk” tool at the Siteman Cancer Center.

For the purposes of this example, we’re going to assume that the example user also had results from the Siteman Your Disease Risk tool (covered on the previous page).

These results, combined with the the family medical history information make it clear that this individual is at high risk.

This suggests that the likelihood category for Frank is arguably Very Likely to Likely.

Tip: There is no ‘right’ answer, and you need to make the best choice you can.

Ultimately, conversations with your chosen healthcare professional will help confirm your choices (at this stage, you’re preparing for those discussions)

Step 5: Determine the Longevity Risk Rating

The next step involves matching the likelihood and consequence categories in the longevity risk rating table.

This is a simple matching of the row & column to get the risk rating.

In general, you can see that the table follows the logic of ‘lower likelihood’ paired with ‘minor consequence’ equals ‘low risk’.

Conversely, ‘high likelihood’ paired with ‘major’ or ‘severe’ consequences equals ‘very high’ risk.

For Frank’s situation, ‘Very Likely’ likelihood is paired with ‘Severe’ consequence.

The result for Frank is a ‘Very High’ longevity risk.

Naturally, this starts the discussion of ‘What should Frank do about this risk to his longevity?’

Trust that this is where we are headed next! Future content will address this.

Helpful Example #2: Type II Diabetes

In our second example, Julia (a fictional example) identifies through the Siteman Your Disease Risk tool, that they are at Above Average risk for developing Type II Diabetes.

Julia is a 50 year old, obese hispanic woman with low physical activity levels.

The elevated disease risk arises from lifestyle, age and ethnic background sources.