“How to make a family medical history tree?”
When it comes to managing your health, knowledge is power. Understanding your family’s medical history can help you and your doctor identify potential health risks and take steps to prevent or manage them.
A family medical history tree is a visual representation of your family’s health ancestry and can be a valuable tool in your healthcare journey.
In this article, we’ll guide you through the process of creating a family medical tracer chart, including gathering information, making the diagram, interpreting the data, updating the details, and sharing the information with doctors and family members.
We’ve included highly practical information to help you with every step of the process.
Gathering information for your family medical history tree
The first step in creating a family health inheritance chart is to gather information. Start by talking to your immediate family members, such as your parents, siblings, and grandparents. These people are most likely to know about your family’s medical heritage. You may also want to contact more distant relatives, such as aunts, uncles, and cousins, to gather extra material.
1. What information to gather
According to CDC, when gathering information about your family’s health patterns, ask about the following. These are the basics:
- Medical conditions: Ask about any major illnesses your family members have had, such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or autoimmune disorders.
- Age of diagnosis: Ask at what age your family members were diagnosed with these conditions.
- Cause of death: If any family members have passed away, ask about the cause of death.
- Ethnicity: Some medical conditions are more common in certain ethnic groups, so it’s essential to know each family member’s background if relatives have intermarried into different ethnicities.
- Lifestyle factors: Ask about any lifestyle factors that may affect health, such as smoking, alcohol consumption, or exposure to environmental toxins.
2. How to record information
Once you’ve gathered the data, it’s important to record it in a way that’s organized and easy to understand … you can use a variety of tools:
- Family medical history forms: Many doctors and hospitals have pre-designed forms that you can use to record the information. (Hospitals generally welcome historical family health blueprints as it also helps with their medical research work.)
- Genealogy software: You can use family health visualization software and record health information for each family member.
- Spreadsheets: You can create a simple spreadsheet to record the information, with columns for each family member and rows for each medical condition.
- Templates: You can find plenty of free family medical genealogy templates online to use as a starting point.
Interpreting and using the data for your family
According to Middlesex Health, sharing the details of your immediate and extended family’s health with your doctor and family members is important. Here is why:
1. What doctors may look for in your family’s health
According to Columbia University Irving Medical Center, your doctor can help you interpret the information in your family’s hereditary health patterns and identify potential health risks better than you can.
- Recurrence of diseases: Doctors will look for ways certain medical conditions have touched multiple family members, especially the serious ailments.
- Age of diagnosis: Doctors will pay attention to the age at which family members were diagnosed with medical conditions. They may deduce that if a disorder was diagnosed at a young age, it may be more likely to be hereditary.
- Different treatment lines taken and their results: Doctors will definitely check if different family members were given varied types of treatment and have shown different results.
- Need for extra genetic testing: Doctors may sometimes recommend additional genetic testing to identify potential health risks. They may like to ensure that what seems like a congenital medical condition is genuinely so.
2. What doctors may evaluate or recommend for you
Some of the follow-up actions your doctor may take after seeing your family health diagram could include these:
- Assessing your potential health risk: Your doctor can use the information in your multi-generational health map to evaluate your chances of getting a specific hereditary illness and recommend preventative measures.
- Personalized healthcare: Your doctor can also use the information to provide more customized healthcare considering your family’s health lineage.
- Suggesting lifestyle changes: If you have a family history of a specific medical condition, your doctor may be able to reduce your risk by recommending lifestyle changes, such as exercising more or eating a healthier diet.
- Scheduling check-ups frequency: If your family records show a predisposition for a particular medical condition, your doctor may recommend more frequent check-ups or screenings.
Paying special attention to the critical illnesses
If there is a clear configuration in the family for chronic ailments such as obesity, cholesterol, diabetes, and hypertension, your doctor will surely take a harder look at these. When these illnesses exist, they can all combine to have a multiplicative effect on the heart.
You and your family members must be alert to these factors so that you can all take early and proactive steps to delay the onset of such ailments – or, if they have already manifested, to keep these conditions well under management.
For each family member, their own doctors may advise a certain frequency of periodic monitoring of cholesterol levels, primary hypertension, diabetes symptoms, or obesity side effects.
Updating the tree – why and how often to do it
According to the Department of Health, Govt. of Australia, once you have your family health history drawn up as a convenient chart, it’s recommended to update the data frequently if there are significant changes that warrant revision.
- New information: As family members age and new medical conditions are diagnosed, it’s important to update this information.
- Changes in lifestyle: If family members make lifestyle changes that could affect their health, such as quitting smoking or losing weight, it’s again important to add this detail.
- Addition of family members: As new family members are born or married into the family, it’s vital to update the family medical ancestry record to include them.
Sharing the information with family members
Discuss your family’s hereditary medical patterns with your relatives and encourage them to add more detail to your diagram. You can share your chart at family gatherings or through social media. Try to make it a convivial affair rather than an onerous task.
If everybody in the family is digitally savvy, consider creating a password-protected online version of the health map that all relatives can access. They would find this easy to share with their doctors.
According to Baystate Health, whatever you do, don’t let the family health chart become a source of fear or discomfort to any family member. Let them all know you have taken this initiative to help them have a healthy and happy life in their own way, with full awareness of your common medical lineage. Allow them to feel like co-creators of this informational legacy you are building for future generations.
In summary
A diagrammatic family medical history is a valuable tool in managing your health. By gathering information, creating the total picture, interpreting the information, updating the details, and sharing the information with doctors and the extended family, you are showing yourself and your near and dear ones that healthcare should be uppermost as priority for everyone concerned. Ask them all to join you in the common family mantra: Stay heart-healthy. Be a Zinda Dil.
References
- CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). “Family Health History: The Basics.” Accessed: April 29, 2023. https://www.cdc.gov/genomics/famhistory/famhist_basics.htm
- Middlesex Health. “Medical history: Compiling your medical family tree.” Accessed: April 29, 2023. https://middlesexhealth.org/learning-center/articles/medical-history-compiling-your-medical-family-tree
- Columbia University Irving Medical Center. “Do you know your family medical history?” Accessed: April 29, 2023. https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/do-you-know-your-family-medical-history
- Department of Health, Govt. of Australia. “Your family health history.” Accessed: April 29, 2023. https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/U_Z/Your-family-health-history
- Baystate Health. “Family Medical History: Why Discussing Health With Your Family Is So Important.” Accessed: April 29, 2023. https://www.baystatehealth.org/news/2018/11/thanksgiving-family-health-history
