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Healthy Reading: Your Family Medical History

Posted on: Monday, 2 January 2006, 12:00 CST

By Michael Woods, The Blade, Toledo, Ohio, The Blade, Toledo, Ohio

Jan. 2--Make 2006 the year that you start a family medical history.

Despite all the screening tests for various diseases, the high-tech imaging devices, and other procedures, a family history remains the gold standard for preventing disease and staying healthy.

Economic pressures, however, are forcing doctors and nurses to cut back on the amount of time they spend with each patient. Detailed family medical histories are becoming one of the casualties, according to U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona.

That is making it more difficult for health professionals to gather enough information about how the health of grandma and grandpa, mom and dad, and your brothers, sisters, and cousins may affect you.

Doctors have known for more than 2,000 years that diseases do run in families. People inherit genes from their parents that increase the risk of diseases. They learn tastes for food and ways of living that may decide how much effect, if any, those genes have on their health and longevity.

How can a family medical history change that?

By profiling the health of relatives, it can help predict whether you may be next in line for a disease. If grandpa, dad, and both of his brothers all had heart attacks in their 50s, it may mean you are next. If grandma, mom, and her sisters all had breast cancer, it may mean that you inherited their risk.

Once you know the risk, you and the doctor can develop a personalized action plan for staying healthy. For preventing heart attacks, it may mean anti-cholesterol medicine and extra effort for a healthy lifestyle. For breast cancer, it may mean more mammograms and taking a drug like tamoxifen.

Surveys have found that more than 90 percent of people in the United States know that a family medical history is important. However, barely 30 percent have ever tried to write down their own family medical history.

One reason may be that writing a history sounds difficult. In reality, it involves more detective work in collecting information than it does writing.

Local and online bookstores have fill-in-the-page family medical history books that help identify the kind of information you need. They also show how to organize the information.

Sites on the Internet automate the whole process. One of the best is the U. S. Department of health and Human Services (HHS) Family History Initiative (www.hhs.gov/familyhistory). HHS a few weeks ago unveiled an updated and improved version of the tool - called "My Family History Portrait" - that anyone can use to compile, keep, and update a family history.

You give the tool your information. It produces a drawing of your family tree and a chart of your family health history. You can reconfigure the tool so that it shifts the focus from yourself to another family member, generating personalized charts for different family members.

HHS suggests that you print an extra copy and share it with your doctor.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Blade, Toledo, Ohio

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Blade

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