Recognise your genes to stay away from disease, says Naresh Trehan at WION World Pulse summit

Naresh Trehan, Chairman and Managing Director of Medanta Hospitals was one of the guests at WION’s World Pulse summit on Wednesday (Mar 18). He spoke on a host of issues related to health and gave insights about how to keep fit. Trehan said there are certain lifestyle diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease that can now be detected through genes.

"There are enough genes that can be identified. You can actually find the imprint in a person's genetic makeup to see where they are vulnerable for which disease," said Trehan.

Most diseases are genetic

"Today, there is enough knowledge about heart disease, but the new heart is cancer and everybody is living in that fear today, is how do I detect cancer at its initial stage because it's totally curable in most instances. So, coupling that with the AI generators of the data mining, big data analysis in matter of hours or days, which used to take us years, has compressed that whole process and we can look at the algorithms," he further said.

When asked about the increasing cases of heart disease that we've seen of late, even in younger people, Tehran said, "So it's a combination of things. It's not one single factor. The most important thing that we say today is recognise your genes. We know very well if there is heart disease in the family, there is a 30% chance that you will get heart disease also."

"Now we also know the risk factors that go along the development of blockages or any other heart disease. So if that person who has genetic history, And we can now do the genome sequencing and we can identify the genes also. And that you decide to smoke and eat butter chicken every day, then you are on a suicidal track," he said further.