WALK THE WALK: A special presentation from Dr. Noura Abul-Husn from 23andme

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WALK THE WALK: A special presentation from Dr. Noura Abul-Husn from 23andme

The presentation by Noura Abul-Husn at the conference focuses on empowering individuals to take charge of their health and make proactive choices to prevent disease. Through an engaging exercise and insightful examples, Abul-Husn emphasizes the importance of prioritizing health, shifting the focus from treatment to prevention, and leveraging genetic information to make informed decisions about personal health risks. Attendees are encouraged to embrace self-care, engage with healthcare proactively, and leverage genetic insights to stay healthy.

Video Transcript

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NOURA ABUL-HUSN: Hi, everyone. Let's see if this works. We'll get started anyways. I'm so excited to be here today and to share with you how you can think about making your health future now. And if I can click to my slides, I will show you why this is important.

We're going to start with an exercise. Making the health feature now. Everybody stand up. Everyone. I know it's really close to lunch, past lunch.

You can take a quick stretch if you need it. Now, we're going to do a really quick exercise. I want you to stay standing if you agree that your health is a top priority for you. Keep standing. And I'm looking to see if anyone is sitting down.

Well done. OK, that was the right answer. You should be standing unless you cannot. OK, keep standing now if in the past year you have visited a doctor for any reason at all. If you've been to the doctor in the past year keep standing. Most people are still standing, a few of you sat down.

Now keep standing up, remain standing, if you have visited a doctor in the last year not because you're sick, but for a checkup, for your wellness, for screening, for prevention. A few of you are sitting down. Actually, this is pretty good. This audience is a little more proactive than usual. Now, many of you are standing, but a few people did sit down. And you can all sit down now actually.

Thank you for the exercise. A lot of people are not interacting with health systems in their healthy state and it's not your fault. If you were sitting down at the end of that exercise there's no judgment here. We actually have a health system today that's far more focused on treatment, on caring for sick patients, than on prevention, which is keeping people healthy.

And so it's really up to us today to flip the script and think about how to be our own advocates to prevent disease, to stay healthy, and to shift that balance so we're not getting sick. And one of the great ways to think about doing that-- I am a geneticist and what's shown here is DNA. Your own genetics, your DNA, your genetic code, can tell you a lot about your personal health risks and can empower you to make more informed health choices. So we're going to show you a few examples of that today.

But if you take away anything from this, I want it to be that health care is a priority. And especially this incredible group of people here should be prioritizing your health. Women are often decision makers when it comes to health care for our elderly parents, our children, our partners, our communities. We don't always do a great job of prioritizing our own health.

The second thing is prevention. Think about health before you get sick. Think about how to stay healthy to keep on doing the things that you love and be with the people that you love. And the third thing is going to be about genetics and how that plays a role in informing your health risk.

So I'll give two examples of what I mean by that. These are the top two leading causes of death among women today, heart disease and cancer. Up to 1 in 3 women will have heart disease in their lifetime. And if you take the most common cause of cancer, breast cancer, in women, 1 in 8 will have breast cancer in our lifetime.

So what do we do today to prevent these diseases from happening? In a traditional health care world you might, for heart disease prevention, be getting your cholesterol level checked around age 40, you may get recommendations on what to do if your cholesterol is a bit elevated or very elevated to change your lifestyle, diet, exercise, maybe medications. But for some people who have a genetic risk that's putting them at higher likelihood of having heart disease and in particular early heart attacks and stroke, those guidelines are not for them. If you are someone with a disease called familial hypercholesterolemia, it's a mouthful, then as soon as you know that, as soon as you have that knowledge, you should be getting your cholesterol checked. And if it's even a tiny bit elevated it should be really aggressively managed to make sure you don't have an early heart attack.

The other example, breast cancer. Hopefully most of that we should be getting mammograms breast cancer screening starting at age 40. Those are the guidelines today. But, once again, there are people with a genetic risk, not only for breast cancer, but for many other types of cancers, in particular this example is of BRCA1, BRCA2, the BRCA genes as some of you might know them.

And if you are someone who has a genetic risk factor like this then your likelihood of getting breast cancer in your lifetime is up to 85% and those guidelines for the general population don't apply to you. You should be getting breast cancer screening far earlier, age 25, and also being evaluated and screened for other types of cancer you might be at risk for. Now these are just two examples, but there are many examples of hidden genetic risks that are simply invisible to us and invisible to the health care world today that if we know about we can actually do something about to stay healthy.

The end. There was one more slide. Well, I'll wrap up with just bringing us back to the three things that I wanted you to take back today. Here they are. To make your health today, make that now, that means we have to prioritize health.

In the same way that we prioritize self care we need to prioritize health care. We need to do that now. This is not the time to wait until you get sick to engage with health care. Engaging with health care for the purpose of staying healthy is key.

And embrace your genetics. Genetics can give you a lot of clues about your personal health risks. And those are clues that you can actually do something about to stay healthy. Thank you all very much.

[APPLAUSE]

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