Health expert, founder of The White Coat and medical laboratory scientist, Ekwy Onyekwele, has called on Nigerians to embrace regular health checks, saying that preventive healthcare should go beyond annual medical examinations.

The expert challenged the widespread belief that yearly medical checkups alone are sufficient for preventive healthcare, arguing that the future of medicine lies in continuous health monitoring, biomarker tracking and what she describes as “Health Intelligence.”

Onyekwele disclosed this during a media chat with The Guardian, she said many illnesses commonly described as “sudden” are, in reality, the result of biological changes that develop gradually over several years but remain undetected because the healthcare system treats diagnostic tests as isolated events rather than interconnected health records.

According to her, preventive healthcare should not be reduced to a once-a-year exercise.

She said: “Nigerians need to go for regular health checks. Healthcare is not something that should be checked once every twelve months and forgotten. The real value of diagnostics comes from monitoring how biomarkers change over time.

“A single laboratory result provides information for that day, but multiple results collected over several years reveal trends that can predict disease before symptoms appear.

Onyekwele recounted the case of an architect whose annual health screenings consistently returned normal results. However, when those results were later reviewed together, they revealed a steady rise in fasting blood sugar over several years, eventually progressing to prediabetes.

She noted that laboratory reference ranges are based on large population averages and often fail to capture gradual but clinically significant changes occurring within an individual.

She added: “A laboratory value can still fall within the accepted normal range while steadily moving in the wrong direction. That’s why personal health baselines and longitudinal monitoring are becoming increasingly important in preventive medicine.

“You don’t hire an investment manager to tell you you’ve already gone bankrupt. You hire one to monitor trends, manage risk and preserve value. Healthcare should operate on the same principle.”

Onyekwele also weighed in on recent public conversations surrounding the death of actor Alexx Ekubo, saying such discussions should extend beyond encouraging routine medical checkups to examining how Nigeria’s healthcare system approaches prevention.

She likened preventive healthcare to investment management, where consistent monitoring and early intervention are more valuable than waiting until significant losses have occurred.

The diagnostics expert argued that effective preventive healthcare requires individuals to establish personal health baselines while governments invest in integrated diagnostic infrastructure capable of preserving health records across multiple healthcare providers.

According to her, such a system would enable doctors to compare current laboratory results with previous records rather than relying solely on population averages.

Citing international examples, Onyekwele pointed to Japan’s long-running Ningen Dock programme, which provides comprehensive periodic health assessments and enables physicians to analyse an individual’s health trends over many years.

She described the model as an example of “Health Intelligence”, the strategic use of diagnostic data, trend analysis and proactive monitoring to detect disease risks before illness develops.

She observed that countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Germany and the United Kingdom have institutionalised preventive screening programmes, while Nigeria has yet to implement a comparable population-wide system despite the growing burden of non-communicable diseases.

She cited research estimating that proactive prevention and early disease detection could reduce healthcare spending in the United States by as much as $2.2 trillion annually by 2040.

According to her, disease management follows what health economists describe as an exponential cost curve, where early intervention is relatively inexpensive but delayed diagnosis significantly increases treatment costs for individuals and governments alike.Looking ahead, Onyekwele predicted that Nigeria’s transition towards continuous biomarker tracking, personalised health baselines, longitudinal monitoring and predictive diagnostics would likely be driven initially by private-sector innovation before broader adoption by the public healthcare system.