Your Family's Medical History : Why it's so important

Do you remember being told as a child, that you inherited your mother's eyes and your father's nose? You could have also inherited a lot of other things from your family - breast cancer, prostate cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, alcoholism, and some mental diseases to name a few.

Knowing about your family's medical and health history is an important source of information about the genetic and environmental factors that combine to influence your health.

A family medical history is a record of important medical information about your relatives. You can begin your family history by simply talking with your immediate family, grandparents, parents and siblings; they provide the most important information about genetic risk. If your parents are deceased, it may take some real detective work to find the desired information.

Medical records, death certificates, newspaper obituaries, and old letters are valuable sources of information you can tap into. Looking over old baby books, photo albums, and scrapbooks can provide visual clues to diseases such as obesity, skin conditions, and osteoporosis. You might consider working on the medical tree at the next family reunion when many family members are available at one time. Every family has an unofficial historian who knows about the health and habits of previous generations.

Knowing Your Family Medical History Can Help

Knowing your family medical history can help you and your doctor determine potential health problems, as well as allow you to take preventive measures to reduce your risk.

Take for example heart disease. There are risk factors that are those that are genetically determined or that you cannot change:

Increasing age
Male sex
Heredity (including race)

There are also risk factors that you may be able to change:

Cigarette and tobacco smoking
High blood cholesterol levels
High blood pressure
Physical inactivity
Obesity and overweight
Diabetes
Stress

By knowing these risk factors and whether or not they are a part of your family history, you can better take charge and control of your health.

What Information Do I Need to Know?

The information should be as specific as possible. Health histories should note the dates of birth, and date and cause of death if known, as well as any serious medical diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and glaucoma.

Older members of your family might be reluctant to discuss sensitive issues like pregnancies, pregnancy loss, and adoptions. Be prepared for embarrassing moments when discussing where your genes come from, and who you share them with, often times family secrets are also medical secrets.Especially important is a history of prostate cancer in men, breast or ovarian cancer in women, and colon cancer in either sex.

Be as specific as possible when gathering information. For example, cardiac arrest is often listed on the death certificate as the cause of death. This only tells us the heart stopped, but not what caused the heart to stop, the cause of which might have been diabetes. Knowing that someone had cancer is important, but knowing exactly what type of cancer, gives even more vital clues to your doctor when trying to track down genetic links.

It is essential to note the age of onset of diseases. Age of onset of diseases provides a vital clue about genetic predisposition, since most genetically predisposed conditions develop before the age of 60. It's much, much more important, for instance, for your doctor to know if your grandmother developed breast cancer at age 38 than if she developed it at 88.

Actually drawing out a genealogical chart may make it easier to see if a disease is actually passed from generation to generation. You might even discover certain patterns of behavior like alcoholism, depression, or suicide within your family.

If you notice the same diseases in different generations or a pattern developing, then obtaining information about cousins, aunts, and uncles might provide a more complete picture. Armed with information about potential health problems within your family, a physician can help tailor your own specific health plan.It can lead your doctor to performing testing or screening for diseases for which you are at risk earlier then he or she would have without such information. Though you can't change your genes, you can take preventive measures and try to modify factors that may affect your health.

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