Family Health Tree – the Most Important Gift

Would you like to give your family a gift that can impact their life, and possibly postpone their death? Compile a Family Health Tree with their ancestors’ health information. 

Seems like a strange and boring gift, doesn’t it. A Family Health Tree? Why would you ever want to do that?  Because the link between genetics and health is a powerful one. Some studies say that over 40 percent of the population is at increased genetic risk for common diseases such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease. If you know your risk, you can make informed decisions about prevention and screening.

For example, if your father had colon cancer at an early age, you should probably be screened at an earlier age for colon cancer than the standard first-time screen age of 50.  I know this from experience. I had a friend who died in his early 40s of colon cancer. His father also died of colon cancer in his early 40s. My friend assumed it was fate. Now we know it was most likely preventable.

Your risk for heart attack increases greatly if you father had a heart attack before 50 or your mother before 65. If you have a sibling with premature heart disease, your risk for heart attack is twofold, according to Erin Michos, M.D., a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. (1) Although some of that risk may be inherited, there also is a possibility that the risk is there because family members have the same poor dietary, exercise, or smoking habits.

What is a Family Health Tree?

A family health tree is a record of your relative’s medical conditions, diseases and causes of death.  Compiling a family medical history can help you and your doctor spot family patterns and use the information for diagnosis, preventative measures, and identifying the risk to you and other family members for certain diseases.

How to Build a Family Health Tree

Start by recording the information you already know.  Collect details about every direct family member who has died and the cause of death. Include the age at which conditions were first diagnosed, their treatment, and if they ever had surgery. Go back three or four generations if you can. 

Then talk with your immediate family members:  parents, grandparents and siblings. Explain the importance for collecting the information and discuss their preference for confidentiality. Ask about the overall health of the family, about possible diseases that might run in the family (see list below), the cause of death and about any sudden unexplained deaths.

Verify the information, or find missing information, from medical records that can be found on death certificates or on cemetery records. Obituaries may also list cause of death (but be careful, they may not be accurate).

Important medical conditions to document include: (2)

·         Cancer

·         Heart disease

·         Diabetes

·         Asthma

·         Mental illness

·         High blood pressure

·         High cholesterol

·         Stroke

·         Kidney disease

·         Alcoholism

·         Birth defects

·         Learning disabilities

For an excellent book on the topic, see Unlocking Your Genetic History: A Step by Step Guide to Discovering Your Family's Medical and Genetic Heritage by Thomas H. Shawker, M.D. It describes how to compile a health history, draw up a medical pedigree, hot to interpret the results and hot to be aware of the warning signs for various important and common genetic diseases.

Start Your Holiday Planning Early

So for those of you who like getting your holiday gifts ready early, consider starting a family health tree. I’ve compiled mine and I know on my mother’s side all my direct ancestors up to my great-great grandmother had a stroke. That might explain why I have high blood pressure, even though I am of normal weight, exercise, don’t smoke and meditate (ok, not as much as I could).  I also did a chart for my husband’s ancestors and gave it to our nieces and nephews. They were delighted, since they didn’t know many details about their grandparent’s health history.

Happy Charting and let us know if you found any surprises.

Family Medical Tree Forms

Tabular format with columns (PDF format, print and complete the information): My Family Health Portrait, The U.S. Surgeon General’s Family History Initiative

Excel version of the above My Family Health Portrait tabular format that you can complete electronically  (for complete instructions on completing the form, seethe above U.S. Surgeon General’s Family History Initiative website). Click on download  for FamilyHealthPortrait.

Family tree structure (PDF format, print and complete the information): My Family Health Tree from the America Heart Association.

Excel version of the above My Family Tree family tree structure – you can type the information in this spreadsheet and print it. The instructions for using the spreadsheet are on the second tab. Click on download FamilyHealthTree.

References

1. What Health Problems Lurk in Your Family Tree?, Better Homes and Gardens Heart Healthy Living, Chrystle Fiedler
2. Tracing Your Family Medical History: Are You at Risk?, About.Com > Genealogy, Kimberly Powell