Few Americans get recommended preventative health services
Only 8 percent of Americans get all 15 “highly recommended” preventative services have the greatest impact on health outcomes.
The great majority of Americans don’t receive all of the recommended preventative health care services.
A study published in the June edition of Health Affairs finds that only 8 percent of Americans get all 15 “highly recommended” preventative services have the greatest impact on health outcomes. On the bright side, only 5 percent of Americans received none of those services.
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The survey of more than 2,800 adults in the U.S. took place in 2015.
The recommended services include the following screenings: blood pressure, cholesterol, breast cancer, colon cancer, cervical cancer, tobacco use, obesity, depression and alcohol use.
Other highly recommended preventative services are vaccines for the flu, shingles and pneumonia. Finally, the survey asked whether people were regularly using aspirin as a preventative medication.
Roughly 85 percent report having their blood pressure checked in the past two years, making that screening the most popular among all of the preventative services.
On the other end of the spectrum is aspirin use: only 46 percent report having talked to a doctor or nurse about the benefits of taking aspirin to prevent heart attacks of strokes. Although medical professionals have for years been advising older adults to take aspirin for those reasons, some research has cast doubt on whether aspirin should be universally recommended, given the increased risks of stomach bleeding that it causes.
About 74 percent of women over the age 50 reported having been screened for breast cancer in the past two years, while 64 percent of adults in that age range have been screened for colon cancer in the past decade.
Similarly, three-quarters of women between the ages of 35-64 have been screened for cervical cancer in the past five years, as recommended.
The survey also investigated whether women over the age of 75 were being screened for cervical cancer and whether men over 75 were being screened for prostate cancer. The medical community now recommends against such screenings, based on the conclusion that those diseases tend to develop so slowly that a person of that age is likely to die of other causes before the cancer becomes lethal. Doctors have increasingly concluded that the risk posed by aggressive interventions to try to stop the diseases from spreading is greater than that posed by the actual disease.
As for vaccines, just under half of adults over 35 report getting a flu shot in the past year. About two-thirds have gotten a vaccine for pneumonia, while just over a third have gotten one for shingles.