How well do you know your family medical history?

We mean, really know –in the sense of knowing what each parent, brother, sister, grandparent, and great-grandparent, aunt, uncle, and cousin has or has had in terms of medical conditions.

The surgeon general has launched an on line tool to help you learn more about your family medical history.

The family medical history is one of the key, basic parts of a medical history. But doctors don’t know how to take it, and patients don’t have the information to give to their doctors.

The surgeon general says, not paying enough attention to the family medical history could mean a lost opportunity to literally save lives.

“I went to the doctor, and she told me I needed a stress test catheterization.” It should have been no surprise to Steve Miller, aged 47, that something was brewing in his coronary arteries. “I have a family history of heart disease and high blood pressure,” he says.

A lot can depend on a careful study of the family medical history. “Conditions like heart disease are much easier to detect and diagnose if the patient’s family’s medical history is studied,” says Dr. Samin Sharma, Director of the Cath Lab at Mt. Sinai Medical Center.

“You’d have a hard time naming a common disease where family history is not the number one risk factor,” states Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Project.

Which is why here at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, an arm of the NIH, announced a major initiative to reach out to all Americans to get them to know their family medical history.
Employees here will serve as the first institution to participate in the on line family history gathering project.

The website, found at the hhs.gov website, walks visitors through the process of gathering a family medical history, and identifies whether someone is at risk for a particular disease.

“Information about family medical history is rarely brought up in the interchange these days between a physician and a patient because everyone is in such a hurry,” states Dr. Collins.

Information about family medical history can provide tremendous benefit to patients when it’s actually obtained. “The message for patients who have family history of heart disease is that they should get a comprehensive check up at an early age, which means between 20 and 30 not just anytime before 50,” says Dr. Sharma.

Head over to the computer and log onto www.hhs.gov/familyhistory . You could very well detect a disease that will occur as much as 20 years earlier than the average population. And you can do something to lower your risk of getting sick of dying from it, like getting earlier screening tests or changing one’s lifestyle.

Indeed, the family link is now a campaign for one cholesterol drug.

It’s so important in the eyes of healthcare experts that the surgeon general wants family medical history to be a topic for discussion over turkey this Thursday. Surgeon General Richard Carmona says, “As grandma, grandpa, aunts and uncles, all of the extended family come in, join up the genealogy game and tracing back as far as you can. It really becomes a fun activity for the family because besides learning about the family medical history, you learn about your social history and it really does help bring the family together.”

And Thursday, Thanksgiving, is National Family History Day. To celebrate, leave the in-laws arguing at the table and head over to the computer and log onto www.hhs.gov/familyhistory. Examining your family medical history could very well help you detect a disease as much as 20 years earlier than the average population. And you can do something to lower your risk of getting sick of dying from it, like getting earlier screening tests or changing your lifestyle.

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