Diseases or tumors don’t grow overnight. Just like short sightedness, you won’t feel that your vision is blur at all when it started.

But when you started to feel there’s vision problem, most of the time you are advice to get a pair of glasses to correct your vision, which in health terms, it meant, you are already diagnosed with a health problem.

Most diseases progress silently and insidiously. Tumors grow over the years from a very small size. When it grows to a stage when it is compressing your other part of body organs, you’ll start to feel pain and discomfort.

(Just like my own experience, my headache result from a 4cm tumor compressing my nerve and a surgery to remove it resulted in damaging my facial nerve.)

Thus, screening performed at regular intervals would enhance screening accuracy and provide a better understanding of your body’s health profile. And detect and small problems before it affects and other important body organs.

1. Latent Infective Stage
At this stage, disease symptoms are not yet apparent, but your risk factors are already present. Eg, obesity, high blood pressure, hypercholesterolaemia, raised blood glucose, etc…

2. Preclinical Stage
Pathological changes have started to develop in your certain organs but the individual is still in apparent health and is asymptomatic.

3. Clinical Stage
Now your clinical symptoms are progressively apparent.

4. Disability / Rehabilitation
As the disease progresses, some organs or your body functions may become impaired. Deterioration and persistent impairment will result in disability.

On the other hand, appropriate treatment and prompt activation of the body’s immune response can cause symptoms to abate and you will progress to rehabilitation.

5. Death
Organ failures will affect metabolism resulting in death.

When the disease causative factors are still latent in us (before the symptomatic stage), health screening can achieve the goal of early detecion and hence we can go for prompt treatment.

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