Knowing Your Family’s Medical History Can Be a Lifesaver

1. What age were they when the disease was diagnosed?

As Rhee explains, there is a “very big difference” in knowing whether a relative was diagnosed with heart disease at age 50 or at age 80. The same is true for breast cancer. If it runs early in your family, you may want to be screened earlier than what the standard guidelines suggest.

2. How severe is the illness?

You want to know if your family member experienced any major complications related to the disease: for example, if they had vision loss due to diabetes, Rhee says.

“Even though you may not have the illness, a strong family history would mean you should be a lot more assertive about how you prevent and detect it. And if it had horrible consequences in your family, such as blindness or amputation, the approach to treat it may be more aggressive,” he says.

3. If a family member died, what was the cause?

“The cause of death at passing is important,” Rhee says. “My father died of prostate cancer. While he was diagnosed with it at a later age, it makes me and my brother more aware about the importance of prostate screening.”

He suggests noting any other chronic illnesses that your loved one may have had when they died.

Laura M. Koehly is also a big proponent of building a family medical history. The chief and senior investigator in the social and behavioral research branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health suggested in an article published this year at aarp.org that family gatherings are a good opportunity to have such a conversation. For an easy way to get started, she suggests turning to a free online tool to make the process easier: My Family Health Portrait, developed by the U.S. surgeon general. The form can be downloaded, shared with other family members and updated whenever new health information becomes available. Koehly suggests appointing a family curator to maintain it. Her institute is working on more tools to train families on how to collect and document health information.

Why it matters

Having a detailed family medical history is important because it can alert you and your primary health care provider to what diseases you may be more at risk of developing. That information can be used to adopt lifestyle changes that could help prevent the disease, as well as establish early screenings to detect the disease as early as possible should it develop.

“There’s a lot you can do about family history once you get it,” Rhee says. “There is work you can do to prevent disease, work you can do to detect it early, and important work you can do to treat it.”

For example, if you have a family history of diabetes, you can adopt a diet and exercise program and maintain a healthy weight to reduce the risk of developing the disease. You can also get regular screenings for diabetes to diagnose it early so it can be treated and hopefully avoid some of the health consequences that can come from untreated diabetes, such as heart disease, kidney problems, neuropathies or blindness, Rhee says.

Within his own family, Rhee says, his Korean grandfather had gastrointestinal (GI) issues, which helped identify acid reflux and GI in his father. “So my brother and I are careful about diet,” he says.

Once you have put together a family medical history, don’t just file it away. Rhee suggests you bring a copy with you when you see your primary care provider. “Time is the most precious commodity with doctors,” he says. “If you do that work for me, I appreciate it.”