KNOW YOR FAMILY TREE

Knowing your family's health history is a crucial step to understanding your own health risks. That is why health-care providers everywhere are encouraging patients to maintain family health records in the form of medical family trees.

A medical family tree, which is a simple record of health problems and medical events your relatives encountered, can help people understand how genetic makeup influences their own health.

Recording family health and medical events can be a lifesaver and a time-saver, especially for people who discover a pattern of serious illnesses in their parents, siblings, grandparents and other family members.

LaDonna Wills, coordinator of the Generations Resource Center at Southeast Missouri Hospital, said keeping track of a person's medical family history makes it easy to share valuable health information with health-care providers.

Together, she said, patients and providers can identify appropriate lifestyle changes and screening tests to help lessen recognized health risks.

"It is important, because whenever you see a physician, you always are asked about your medical history," Wills said. "Having this information available certainly helps with that. If you have a family history of things you are at risk for, they can watch for those things, or maybe you can adjust your lifestyle to deal with that risk."

The American Medical Association recommends that people record the health histories of blood relatives -- parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles.

For relatives who are deceased, information can be gleaned from living relatives who were close to them. Find out the person's age and cause of death.

If the person was ever diagnosed with heart disease, cancer, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes or allergies, note their age at the time of diagnosis and be as specific as possible about the nature of the disease.

"People definitely should keep track of the kinds of illnesses people in their family have," Wills said.

"If their parents or grandparents, for example, died in their 50s of a heart attack, then that's something they would want to let their health care provider know about so they can watch for additional risk factors."

Generally, experts recommend recording the following:

* Relatives' ages.

* If deceased, age at death and cause of death.

* Medical conditions and lifestyle factors.

* Age when the condition began.

* Treatment.

* Reproductive history, such as difficult pregnancies and deliveries, miscarriages and stillbirths.

* Ethnic background.

Notes about lifestyle should include factors such as smoking, lack of exercise, poor diet or excessive drinking.

Assembling a family medical history can be as easy as talking to a family member who knows everything about your family. Family reunions or other gatherings also are good times to compile information.

Keep in mind that diseases that exist today had different names at the turn of the century. For example, "dropsy" was an early 20th century term for congestive heart failure, and "apoplexy" describes what is now known as a stroke.

Researchers could run into roadblocks because cancer was once regarded as a shameful disease and was not discussed as openly as it is today. And breast, ovarian, uterine and other cancers may have been concealed as "female troubles."

In addition to talking to relatives, look in family Bibles, death certificates, obituaries, baby books and photo albums for clues.

Health-care providers remind medical history researchers that several occurrences of a particular disease in their family does not immediately indicate they are at high risk for that disease.

Anyone who is concerned about patterns revealed in a medical family tree should consult with their physician and review the information with him or her.

After recording a medical family tree, keep the information in a safe, accessible place and be sure to let others know where it is. File cabinets, fire-proof document boxes, family Bibles or computer file are some options.

"Whatever works best for them, wherever they keep their important information would be a good place to keep the medical family tree," Wills said.

"Different people keep things in different places but just so they know where it was. It's good to let other people in the family know where it is also."

Wills said some people do not actually record their family medical information but rely on their memories.

"I think a lot of people depend on recall or if something happens they ask around their family," she said. "But I think people, in general, are becoming more aware of the need to know what their family medical history is."