How to Gather Health and Medical Information from Family History
Do you have a family? Yes, you do, even if you don’t always like to claim them. With your family comes a family health history. Although having a sibling with cancer or a grandparent who died of heart disease doesn’t mean that you’re going to suffer the same fate, many disease tendencies can be inherited, and knowing your family history can give you a blueprint of potential health landmines in your genetic makeup.
Your doctor needs to know about any family history of illness, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and so on, because it can change prevention, testing, and treatments due to certain familial links.
When compiling a family health history, start with your immediate family -brothers, sisters, mom, and dad. You can start by asking questions of your parents, such as:
-
How long did your parents live and what did they die of?
You may not get a straight answer on the cause of your grandparents’ deaths, because often cause of death wasn’t accurately recorded a generation or so ago. Even deaths recorded as accidents may not be accurate; a “car accident” may have been caused by a sudden heart attack.
-
Did they have any health problems?
Try to get specifics; “bad blood” could be anything from anemia to syphilis! Some of the more common conditions with genetic links are heart disease, cancer, addiction, and diabetes.
-
What do you remember about them?
They may remember that grandma was blind and had only one leg without making the connection that these conditions may have been caused by diabetes.
-
Do you have any pictures of relatives?
One look at a series of pictures of great grandma and grandma at different ages can make it evident that osteoporosis runs in the family – they kept getting shorter!
-
Did any diseases or defects “run in the family”?
Expect some wafflingon the answer if mental conditions or birth defects were common in the family. Explain your need to know as a desire to understand your family medical history rather than pure nosiness.
-
What about your brothers and sisters and their families?
Make sure that you’re recording health issues only from blood relatives, not their spouses or their in-laws.
After picking mom and dad’s brain, talking to your aunts and uncles may yield new information or a different slant on things. Always start with your most talkative/nosy family members first, but remember that they may also be the most likely to embellish the family history! To dig a little deeper, particularly if your immediate ancestors have passed on or don’t have the info you need, try to access death certificates, obituaries, and family medical records from extended family members or library newspaper files. If anyone in your family is a pack rat or a genealogy buff, he may have already done much of the legwork for you, and would probably be flattered if you asked for a copy of his research.
After you gather enough data to make up a cohesive family history, write it all down. You can get fancy, drawing an elaborate tree with actual branches, or you can write it down in simple linear fashion. The U.S. Surgeon General considers your family history recording important enough to have devised a personalized form that you can use to record pertinent info; you can find it at familyhistory.hhs.gov. Some other helpful Web sites to consider are birthrecords.ws and NGSgenealogy.com. If you’re adopted, you may not be able to delve into your family history to any great degree. Adoption agencies often do have some family medical history on file. Your adoptive parents may or may not have this information available for you, but the agency they used may. It’s worth a phone call or visit to get any bits of information they have.
Regardless of whether you’re adopted, you may be unable to come up with any concrete past family medical information. If that’s the case, don’t worry about it. Doctors can use this info as a tool to help in some situations, but medical personnel will use their expertise regardless of having any pertinent family history.
Liked it
