Family health history

With some work—generally very interesting work—you may find clues that could make an important difference in your life and the lives of your children.

By collecting family health records, you can provide your family with important information about the health of the relatives who preceded them. Medical records can be important tools in understanding how a family's inherited traits may interact with infections, medications, drugs and many other influences.

Such a record may be started at any time, but the ideal time is before a family is planned, or even before marriage. Faithfully kept, it can be a useful diagnostic tool in all medical consultations, including genetic counseling.

The March of Dimes preconception family health questionnaire and adolescent/adult family history questionnaire can be helpful for you and your partner and can be brought to a genetic counseling appointment. You can send a copy to other family members to add as much family health information as possible. Many of the factors that determine how healthy we are come from our ancestors, so every piece of the puzzle that you can find could make a difference.

Knowing that some of your ancestors had glaucoma or breast cancer, for instance, can tell you to be more alert to warning signs yourself and to emphasize early detection. If family members suffered from diabetes, you might want to control your weight to offset this tendency.

Some family "gene sleuths" recommend sending such a form to all relatives, asking them to fill in medical information such as heart disease, mental retardation, and hearing or vision defects, and to write down information on other relatives they know about.

If you don't have enough information on generations past, such as your grandparents, you can try these ways to get clues:

• Get death certificates from state health departments. They usually cost under $10 and generally note an age and cause of death.
• Seek medical records from relatives' doctors or hospitals where they died.
• Keep copies of medical exams, hospital discharge summaries, neurological tests, specialists' letters and any genetic tests on relatives.

Gathering your family health history
Give each member of your family a copy of the family health questionnaire. Each can contribute information about his or her own parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and siblings. You also might want to get information on family members' lifestyle habits, such as smoking and drinking alcohol.

When you receive the completed forms, study the answers and note any recurrent diseases. You already may know that you and your mother share a tendency toward being overweight, but if you learn that her mother and aunts shared diabetes, that's something new and important. You may want to take this information to your doctor or genetic counselor for further interpretation.

Although you may be concerned about what you'll discover when the questionnaires come back, honest information may help you prevent future illnesses or even tragedies in your family. You also may find that you come from very sturdy stock indeed.

No matter what, the information you gain will become a very important heirloom to leave for generations yet to come. You may want to draw a simple family tree with health information noted to pass along through the family. As new information turns up, and as new children are born, the tree will grow.

Courtesy of the March of Dimes