Better Health & Living
Do You Know Your Family Health History?
Published in weekly_column | 0 Comments, Talk about this article »
Forget about pricey DNA tests and high-tech gene chips. America’s top genetics experts say your family health history is the most powerful and important genetic check you’ll ever have. This new family tree—call it the Family Genome Project—can clue you in to inherited risks for serious health problems like heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and even several types of cancer, so you can prevent them or catch them in their earliest, most treatable stages.
While 96 percent of Americans say a family health history is important, one recent poll found that just 30 percent have tried to put one together. It’s not difficult to do: All you need is a pencil, paper, and family members gathered around the dining room table. Thanksgiving could be the perfect time to get the conversation started.
“I think everyone needs to do a family-health history,” says Monica Giovanni, a genetic counselor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “It puts you on the cutting edge of preventive medicine because it tells you about more than just genes. It shows how the genetic tendencies you share with other family members interact with the lifestyle habits and environment you may share, such as similar eating and exercise habits.”
Here’s what you need to know about launching your own family genome project.
I’m uncomfortable asking relatives personal health questions. What’s a polite way to get answers?
Explain that a family health history will help everyone, not just you. If you’re talking with grandparents or aunts and uncles, tell them that it will help their own children and grandchildren. Explain that you’re not trying to be nosy; you’re completing a health history for the whole family.
What information do I need?
Get information from four generations of first-degree relatives first. That’s you and your siblings, your and your siblings’ children, your parents, and your grandparents. If you can include aunts, uncles, cousins, and more-distant relatives after that, go for it.
Try to find out about major illnesses and, for deceased relatives, causes of death. It’s also important to know the age at which someone got sick or was diagnosed with a health problem and their age at death when applicable. Developing a health condition—or dying from it—at an early age can be a warning sign of inherited risk. For example, if your grandfather died of heart disease at age 45, he’s more likely to have had genetic risks than someone who died after a heart attack at age 85. Ask about health habits: Was someone a lifelong smoker? Were they overweight or extremely fit? Did they have a job that exposed them to a pollutant with health risks? Also ask about ethnicity and country of origin; some diseases are much more common among some populations than among others.
Once we have our history written down, what do we do with it?
First, you can enter it into My Family Heath Portrait, a free, online program developed for the U.S. Surgeon General at https://familyhistory.hhs.gov. You can print out the information to give to your relatives—and take it to your doctor.
You can also begin looking for health patterns that may reveal an inherited health risk. Clues may include the same disease in more than one close relative; diseases occurring at an earlier age than expected; a disease that usually doesn’t affect both genders (such as breast cancer in a male relative); and certain combinations of diseases within one family, such as heart disease and diabetes, breast and ovarian cancer, or uterine (endometrial), stomach, and colon cancer.
If you notice a pattern, be sure to ask your doctor how it changes the schedule you should follow for screenings or extra tests (such as earlier testing for diabetes, colon cancer, or breast cancer), your health goals (your doctor may want to keep your blood pressure and cholesterol levels under tighter control if you have a family history of heart disease), and the types of healthy-lifestyle steps you should be taking. In some instances, your doctor may suggest you meet with a genetic counselor to interpret your results and decide if you need genetic testing.
Will we need genetic tests, too?
Usually, no. While most families have inherited tendencies for one health concern or another, most are conditions affected by large groups of genes for which there are no definitive tests. If that’s true in your family, simply knowing you have a risk can help you and your doctor make smarter decisions about your health. But for a small percentage of families with patterns of breast cancer; breast and ovarian cancer; or colon, uterine, and stomach cancer, genetic tests may reveal specific, inherited mutations that raise cancer risk significantly. Testing pinpoints which relatives carry the genes—and who needs lifesaving, early cancer screenings.
By Susan Flagg Godbey and the editors of Better Health & Living®
Related Articles
How to Get Enough Sleep
Posted by Susan Flagg GodbeyCan the Flu Get You?
Posted by Susan Flagg GodbeyHealthy Meals on a Budget
Posted by Susan Flagg GodbeyPay Attention to the "Little Things"
Posted by Susan Flagg GodbeyTexting: What Not 2 Do
Posted by Susan Flagg Godbey
» Advertisement «