User experience[edit]
Your Disease Risk has a simple, straightforward interface. Questionnaires can be completed in a matter of minutes, and for each disease, the site offers both a visual and verbal risk estimate as well as personalized tips for prevention. The site can also show users what their risk could be should they adopt various healthy behaviors. Tailored screening tips and recommendations for making health changes in communities are also part of site results.
Methodology[edit]
The calculations and algorithms used to calculate and display risk estimates in Your Disease Risk are the product of an ongoing process of expert consensus.[2] Epidemiologists, clinicians, and other health specialists regularly review the current scientific evidence for each disease, identifying established and probable risk factors for each. This information is then used to develop or revise calculations that generate a user's risk of disease compared to average risk in the population for someone of the same age and sex.
A validation study found Your Disease Risk to provide well calibrated estimates[5] of cancer risk in the general population. For individual women, the discriminatory accuracy[5] for colon cancer was 0.67, for ovarian cancer 0.59, and for pancreatic cancer was 0.71. For individual men, the discriminatory accuracy[5] for colon cancer was 0.71 and for pancreatic cancer was 0.72. These values exceed the performance of many other cancer risk prediction tools.[6][7]
The approach used to calculate cancer risks in Your Disease. Risk is also used to calculate the risks of the other diseases.[8] Validation studies for these non-cancer estimates are ongoing.[9]