Transcript for:
Understanding Family Health History Importance

[Music] Family history is one of the best tools you can use to know about your health history. It's a way of documenting when diseases are in the family, what people died from, and it's interesting to me that people know a lot about their genealogy, they'll know where people are married and where their children were born, but they won't ask what people died from in the family, they might know how old they are and it's just a simple way of starting to engage in your own family health history. And some of the key factors you might look for is documenting why people died, what they died from, how long they had the disease, any medical records that you could get, that's all a good place to start. It's important to know about your family history because there are certain diseases that may be inherited in your family and maybe there's genetic blood tests that we could do or a saliva test that we could do, to see if that is something that you're at risk for or maybe your children are at risk for, and there may be things that we can do to help prevent that disease or at least detect it very early and treatable. So let me give some examples of how a family health history could be important to you. So if you have something common like cancer in your family, cancer is a common disease, lots of people have cancer in their family, but if you have cancer at a young age, so maybe breast cancer below age 50 or colon cancer below age 50, then maybe we'd offer you screening at an earlier age than typical. A genetic test might even help inform that information even more by knowing whether you're at risk at all, because if you have the same gene predisposition to cancer say your mother or your brother or whoever you're worried about in the family, then maybe we could offer you screening at an early age, maybe there's some kind of medications that will help prevent cancer or reduce the risk of cancer, that's one of the examples of how this could be useful to you. If you think about some other conditions like inherited cardiac disease, so if you have a strong family history of heart disease in the family, again we might be able to offer you something different, maybe an echocardiogram or screening for heart arrhythmia, so defects in how the heart beats, those kinds of things might help us screen you differently and help inform your medical care. [Music]