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The once-a-year appointment can reveal vital health information for both you and your doctor.

It's usually covered by your health insurance, it doesn't take much time, and it's a great way to learn about your present and future health.

While men often call it the yearly physical, the annual ritual is better named a wellness visit or preventive health appointment. Whatever you call it, men should still have one every year as it remains an important part of primary care, according to Dr. Asaf Bitton, executive director of Ariadne Labs and primary care physician at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Here is what men need to know to minimize discomfort of a prostate biopsy and get the best results.

What Is It?

A heart transplant is surgery in which a patient with a life-threatening heart problem receives a new, healthy heart from a person who has died. In a heart transplant, the patient who receives the new heart (the recipient) is someone who has a 30 percent or greater risk of dying within 1 year without a new heart. Although there is no absolute age limit, most transplants are performed on patients younger than 70 years old.

The person who provides the healthy heart (the donor) is usually someone who has been declared brain dead and is still on life-support machinery. Heart donors are usually younger than 50, have no history of heart problems, and do not have any infectious diseases.

What Is It?

A heart-lung transplant is surgery for someone with life-threatening heart and breathing problems. Surgeons remove the damaged heart and lungs and replace them with a healthy heart and lungs from a person who has died.

The person receiving the new heart and lungs (the recipient) is someone with a high chance of dying within one to two years without a transplant. The person providing the healthy heart and lungs (the donor) is someone who is brain dead, but still on life-support machinery.

What Is It?

In lung transplant surgery, someone with life-threatening respiratory problems is given one or two healthy lungs taken from a person who has died. If one lung is transplanted, the procedure is called a single-lung transplant. If both lungs are transplanted, it is a bilateral or double-lung transplant.

Lungs for transplantation usually come from young, healthy people who have had severe brain damage because of trauma or cardiac arrest (a stopped heart). Their lungs and other organs are maintained with life-support machinery.

News briefs

About half of all people in the United States living with a diagnosis of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) are age 50 or older. But new data from the CDC suggest most Americans have never been tested for the virus (which causes AIDS, the late-stage phase of HIV infection). According to the June 28, 2019, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, less than 40% of people in the United States have had an HIV test, even though the CDC recommends routine testing at least once for everyone age 13 to 64. The CDC notes that older adults sometimes aren't tested for HIV because they don't consider themselves at risk for infection or because their health care providers don't offer them the test. Older people may also mistake late-stage HIV symptoms, such as weight loss and frequent illness, for signs of normal aging. Those symptoms occur because HIV attacks the body's immune system. But a delay in diagnosis allows the virus to cause more damage. That's unfortunate, since medications can keep the infection from progressing.

If you haven't had an HIV test, talk to your doctor about whether it's right for you, no matter your age, especially if you are sexually active or have had more than one sex partner.

Research we're watching

With some smartphones, you can unlock the phone simply by showing your face. One day, a short video of your face may do far more � maybe even measure your blood pressure.

That's the premise of a novel smartphone-based technology described in the August issue of Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging. For the study, researchers took two-minute videos of 1,328 Chinese and Canadian adults, using an iPhone equipped with transdermal optical imaging. The software measures blood pressure by detecting blood flow changes in a person's face. When compared with readings taken using a traditional blood pressure cuff, the video blood pressure readings were about 95% accurate.

Active surveillance and watchful waiting are the most conservative � and increasingly popular � approaches to prostate cancer management. Is one of these right for you?

Over the years, the outcome for prostate cancer has turned out to be better than expected for many men.

While prostate cancer is quite common, the risk of dying from the disease is low, even without treatment. In fact, most diagnosed men will die from something else, like heart disease. Even so, prostate cancer remains the second leading cause of cancer deaths (after lung cancer) in men, according to the American Cancer Society.

On call

Q. I suddenly developed low back pain for the first time. My doctor said I did not need an x-ray or other imaging test. Is that normal and are there any situations when a test would be needed?

A. Yes, your doctor is following the current guidelines. Unless you have other symptoms in addition to low back pain, an x-ray, CT scan, or MRI is not likely to be helpful. But it could cause unnecessary worry while waiting for the results and cost you some money if it's not covered by your health insurance. In addition, many people have "false-positive" results in which an abnormality is detected but turns out to be harmless.

Your blood pressure is one of the best ways to measure overall health and possible risk factors. Do you know your numbers?

There are many important health markers: cholesterol levels, blood sugar levels, weight � to name but a few. But men often fail to use one of the most important: blood pressure.

"Your blood pressure is one of the easiest and simplest measurements and can tell you so much about your current and possible future health," says Dr. Randall Zusman, director of the division of hypertension for Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital's Corrigan Minehan Heart Center. "Yet most people don't know their number or check it on a regular basis, so they may not be doing everything they need to lower their risk of a heart attack or stroke."