by Sovawanea

Ah, the Holidays are upon us. Many of us will be will be visiting and spending time with our families. Family gatherings give us a chance to catch up, to reminisce about old times and to cement the bonds of friendship, in the best case scenarios. Sometimes it just reminds us of why we moved more than a thousand miles away and only visit once a year. Regardless of which situation is closer to your own, spend a little time this year learning about your family health history. While many of us are young, healthy and avoid going to the doctor at all costs, it is really important to establish a relationship with a primary care doctor. Armed with your family health history, you and your doctor can decide what kind of screening tests you may need and when or even what kind of lifestyle changes you can focus on to help modify conditions that you are most at risk for.

For a good basic family history, you are going to want to start with the age all of your grandparents and parents lived to or are currently, if they are deceased you will want to know the cause, but you will also want to know what kind of major illnesses they have survived. Once you have that established, try to see how far back you can go. Someone could have a strong family history of colon cancer, for example, and may not be aware of it if their grandparents and parents have been able to have colonoscopy screening and had polyps that could have grown to be cancerous removed. But, if the great-grandparents died from it and the grandparents have been treated for polyps, the next generations will want to make sure this is a condition that they are screened for and they may even want to start screening earlier than the typical recommendation.

Another thing to ask about is risk factors. If you find out one of your relatives had cancer or emphysema, did they smoke? If a relative died of liver failure were they a heavy drinker? And do not be surprised if different relatives have different memories of what health problems relatives who died many years ago had. This may seem a bit morbid topic for the holidays, but it is important information and it's might be a weird topic to discuss anytime. Once you get started talking about the past and your family history, there will be plenty of anecdotes and stories that will come to mind that aren't dealing with death and disease. Just don't forget to take some notes, so that you can bring in a good, detailed history to your doctor. If you don't have one yet, then I think I have a suggestion on what your New Year's resolution should be....