Assess your risk of disease with Zumm

We’re always being bombarded with the latest remedies, superfoods or lifestyle change tips designed to prevent us from getting all types of diseases.  Well now, students in the US believe they’ve created an app that can give us some early signs of potential health concerns and ways to try and keep them at bay.

Zumm is a free new iPad application developed by students at Washington University which analyses a user’s lifestyle and gives an indication as to whether they are at risk of six major diseases: heart disease, stroke, diabetes, lung cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer (for women), and prostate cancer (for men). It also gives you some tips on what you can do to lower the danger of developing them.

The app analyses a series of questions answered by the user about their lifestyle. Once these questions have been answered, the app is able to detect the user’s risk of developing disease, as well as being able to see what your future risks could be if you made healthy changes and the factors that are increasing and decreasing your risk for each disease. Users then receive ongoing health messages tailored to their profile.

The ratings work on an easy to read chart which shows whether the person has a average, higher than average or below average risk of developing a disease. Once the results have been viewed, the app will explain what can be done to reduce the risks – from suggesting more exercise or changing diet to more detailed responses. The results will be specifically tailored to each user.

The app has been developed by the same team who created the award winning Your Disease Risk website. Zuum packages the latest science into an engaging, easy-to-use health app. It builds on Colditz’s work in the Nurses’ Health Study and Growing Up Today Study, groundbreaking research started in 1976 and 1996, respectively, that continues to examine the links among cancer, alcohol use, diet, exercise and other factors.

The Zumm team insist that the app “cannot predict if you will get a particular disease. It estimates your chances and offers personalized tips for reducing your risk”. We’d never recommend an app that can predict diseases but as far as being able to assess any potential risks to your health, we say give this a go.