Your family’s medical history enables you and your doctors to recognise patterns of disease amongst your close relatives, which may alert you to a possible greater risk of those diseases in the future. This means that you can take measures to reduce those risks in advance.
Angelina Jolie made this very clear publicly after her mother and sister died at a young age of breast and ovarian cancer and she herself tested positive for the BRCA1 gene. After learning that this made her risk of developing breast cancer 85 percent and ovarian cancer 50 percent, she elected to have both a double mastectomy and removal of both ovaries to prevent this from happening to her.
On the other hand, a good friend of mine in his early 40s who was young, very fit and had everything to live for wrongly attributed his urinary symptoms to the usual signs of an ageing and enlarging prostate, blissfully unaware that his own father had died in his early 40s from aggressive prostate cancer. His father had simply never told him. Tragically, my friend ignored his symptoms for so long that by the time his own prostate cancer was diagnosed it had spread throughout his body and he died soon after.
DETECTIVE WORK
Of course, not everybody can know their family history. If somebody is adopted or has parents who are estranged the data simply is not there. Sometimes a diagnosis was uncertain and unreliable. But even in difficult situations there are ways of trying to gather the information required. For most of us, a family gathering is a useful opportunity to raise the subject of medical histories. Then there are obituaries and death certificates for older generations that can be retrieved and studied. A complete family history includes all three generations involving children, siblings, parents, aunts and uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents and cousins.
INTERPRETING THE FACTS
However good the information at hand, interpretation is key. Even if there is a strong family history of a certain condition it does not mean that you will necessarily develop that condition yourself. Equally, if there is no family history of a certain condition, it does not mean that you will never necessarily develop that condition either. Remember that even if both parents died at a young age of heart disease or lung cancer, it could well be it was because they were chain-smokers rather than that they carried a certain gene. It is likely that many ‘dodgy’ genes will do you no harm whatsoever, unless certain the factors in the environment impinge on them unfavourably. This is why lifestyle and the environment in which you live are often equally important to genetics.
You cannot change your genetic make-up and the DNA you inherited from your parents, which may or may not make you more susceptible to common medical conditions. However, you can change your lifestyle and your environment, and armed with accurate knowledge about your family’s medical history you can do a great deal to assist with early diagnosis of your symptoms, and indeed, to prevent those symptoms ever developing in the first place. Knowing about your own family medical history, updating it frequently and sharing that information with your doctor could even save your life. Just ask Angelina Jolie.
LIFE SAVING INFORMATION
Breast Cancer Focus
In the future, it is hoped that a risk assessment through knowledge of family medical history will become a more exact science. Very recently, researchers found that by looking at 77 different genetic markers for breast cancer, for example, even in women without a family history of the disease, they could provide a risk score for individual women quantifying their particular risk. Women in the top 20 percent of the risk score, for example, had a 1.8 increased chance of breast cancer compared to the average woman. A woman in the top 1 percent had a three times increased chance equating to a one in three overall risk of developing breast cancer during her lifetime. Such tests, however, would be prohibitively expensive to carry out on every woman as a screening procedure. The relative risk scores would also create huge uncertainty and confusion in women faced with decisions about how these results might change their lives and what they should do about them.
Did You Know?
Medical insurance companies know a thing or two about relative medical risks and are particularly keen to learn about any future policy holder’s family history. This is why they ask the question: are your parents still alive? If not, what they die from and at what age? The younger they were the more significant that information is likely to be.
