Tegan Taylor: Now, for a lot of people, interacting with the healthcare system often starts with a symptom or feeling unwell, but we are too often intervening too late, when illnesses have advanced and when more could have been done to prevent them in the first place. That's the view of an international group of scientists who think much more needs to be done to curb the growing numbers of chronic and preventable diseases that they say risk overwhelming our health system. Professor Luigi Fontana is director of the Healthy Longevity Research and Clinical Program at the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre. Hi Luigi.
Luigi Fontana: Hello.
Tegan Taylor: So you've set yourself a pretty small goal; just completely rethinking our healthcare system from treatment to prevention. Where do you even start with this?
Luigi Fontana: Well, it's a very complicated question. What we know is that our healthcare systems aren't sustainable because there are several issues, one is the ageing of the population. These elderly people are not healthy, they have several chronic diseases. The epidemic of obesity, especially in younger children and teenagers is really causing huge problems because the sooner people become obese and develop insulin resistance, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, several forms of cancer and kidney disease basically they get sicker sooner, and the system, this is unsustainable. So we need to rethink how we approach medicine. And we just published a paper in PLOS Medicine discussing these issues and propose some ideas on how to start to solve these major problems.
Tegan Taylor: What are some of your ideas?
Luigi Fontana: First of all I think one is education. Everybody knows that eating healthier, more fruits and vegetables, and exercise, not smoking or drinking is healthy, but we know better than that. We have really pinpointed the mechanisms so that in a very precise way we can prescribe diet, exercise and other lifestyle intervention so that you can prevent many of the common chronic diseases.
So, many of the common chronic diseases we see in our hospitals, they share a common metabolic substrate, so cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, many of the liver and kidney diseases, they have a common metabolic substrate caused by excessive abdominal fat, inflammation and other hormones that are changed by these modifications of body composition and metabolic health.
