When should you get a health checkup?

The honest answer is: more often than most people do, and less often than a private screening package will sell you. Here is how we think about it.

In your twenties and thirties

Once every two to three years is usually enough if you are well. Worth having: blood pressure, weight and waist measurement, and a conversation about smoking, alcohol and contraception or family planning. Cholesterol and blood sugar if there is family history.

In your forties

Annually, or every two years at minimum. This is the decade where blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar start drifting silently. It is also when cardiovascular risk scoring becomes useful, because there is still time for the result to change the outcome.

In your fifties and beyond

Annually. Add the screening programmes that apply to you — bowel, breast, cervical, prostate discussion — and an eye check, which catches both eye disease and, often, undiagnosed diabetes and hypertension.

Whatever your age, come sooner if

You have a new symptom that has lasted more than two or three weeks. Unexplained weight loss. A change in bowel or bladder habit. A lump. Breathlessness that is new. A mole that has changed. None of these are usually serious. All of them are worth ruling out.

What a good check-up is not

It is not a scan of everything. Broad imaging in a person with no symptoms finds a great many harmless things and generates anxiety, further tests and occasionally real harm chasing them. A good check-up is targeted at what is common, serious, silent and treatable.

What to bring

Your medicines, including anything bought over the counter. Any home blood-pressure readings. A note of what your parents and siblings have been treated for. And the questions you have been meaning to ask — write them down, because they evaporate in the room.

Book a health check-up and we will go through the whole picture with you, not just the numbers.