Taking Your Parents for Their First Health Check-up: Essential Tests
Lifestyle & PreventionTaking parents for a first health check-up? This guide covers basic examination items, screening for common chronic diseases and complications, and cancer-screening considerations.
Would you like to understand your parents’ health status and detect diseases early so that early intervention can be provided, but at the same time avoid excessive examinations and treatment that could place physical and psychological burdens on them? How can both goals be achieved? When taking your parents for a health check-up for the first time, which tests should be prioritised?
First, it should be noted that symptoms of physical discomfort are very likely a “distress signal” from the body. In particular, when older adults experience physical discomfort, it is best to seek assessment in the relevant specialty to determine the cause. If they do not usually have any particular discomfort, or if their chronic diseases are relatively well controlled, they may choose to have a health check-up to understand their health status, detect diseases early, and achieve early intervention.
Adult health check-ups mainly include screening in two areas: chronic disease screening and tumour screening. The characteristics of health check-ups for older adults are: (1) the incidence of chronic diseases and tumours is higher than among young and middle-aged people; (2) they are more likely to have complications related to chronic diseases; and (3) in tumour screening, after a certain age, the advantages and disadvantages should be weighed, and opportunistic screening may be chosen or tumour screening may be discontinued.
Therefore, the key tests to prioritise when taking your parents for a health check-up for the first time will next be introduced from three aspects: basic health examination items, chronic disease items, and tumour items.
Basic Health Examination Items
Basic health examination items are basic tests recommended for people of all ages that can preliminarily, quickly, and at low cost determine whether there are major diseases in the cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, urinary, blood, and other systems.
Basic health examination items include: physical examination, vital signs (blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate), body weight, waist circumference, complete blood count, routine urinalysis, routine stool examination, liver function, kidney function, electrocardiogram, and abdominal ultrasound.