Prevention is better than cure. An apple a day, keeps the doctor away. These are just some of the cliches we would usually hear.
A new study suggests that we can really be the best predictors of our own health. So if you say that you are in great health condition, you might just really be.
According to Medical News Today, a study published in Psychosomatic Medicine found that people who gave a self rating of their health condition as excellent were less likely to have a poor immune system than those whose self-rated heath was lower.
Study co-author Sheldon Cohen, of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, claimed that previous studies have showed that self-ratings of poor health are predictors of poor health in older adults.
As per Cohen, although taking the effects of the objective indicators of health such as physical exams, medical records and hospitalizations into consideration, these connections are still significant.
It has also been suggested before that when people engage in a healthier lifestyle or have a better emotional well being, they tend to see themselves as healthier and less likely to become ill.
In their most latest research, Cohen and her colleagues tried to find out if the immune response can be predicted by the self-ratings of health among younger, healthy adults and whether or not these results can also be brought by socioemotional factors or lifestyle.
Subjects with lower-rated health more likely to develop a cold
With an average age of 33 years, the team had asked 360 healthy adults to evaluate their health as "poor," "fair," "good," "very good" or "excellent."
And, just like the researchers has expected, only 2% of participants turned out to assess their health as fair, while none of them reported having a poor health. This is because the study has only recruited healthy adults.
The subjects were then monitored for 5 days as they were exposed to a common cold virus to see if anyone develops the illness. The action taken by the team aims to test their immune response and, consequently, around a third of participants have developed a cold.
However, the experts have strongly noted that further investigations are still required to determine if these findings can be adapted to a public health setting.
