Probably the best investment you can make in your own health and that of your family is to put together your family health history.
The Surgeon General agrees. He's upgraded and simplified the software and it's all free. Better yet, when you share your family health tree with a relative, the software can "'reindex" so that relative becomes the center of his or her own tree and all that information you share takes its proper place.
Tracking red flags in family history
A good family health history is more important than a gene test in predicting your future medical needs, but it's hugely underused. Today, the government begins offering a free new service to try to change that - helping people compile a health history at home, e-mail it to relatives who can fill in the gaps, and even pop it into their doctors' computers.
"That is an amazingly positive investment," acting Surgeon General Steven Galson, whose office spearheaded the initiative, said. "You're going to help your doctor learn a lot more about you by spending those 20 minutes, and you can share that invested time around your family and with your physicians."
The goal: Just as people create ancestral family trees, create a family "health tree." It may sound old-fashioned in this era of gene discovery. But genetics specialists use these "pedigrees" to look for patterns of inherited illnesses that can provide a powerful window on someone's brewing health risks.
"Family health history is the first genetic test, but it encompasses much more than genes," says James O'Leary of the nonprofit Genetic Alliance.
A family's shared environmental or lifestyle factors are key, too. Add those together, and a family health tree "is the way you identify what is important to pay more attention to," he explains.
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A survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found fewer than 30 percent of Americans have ever collected health information from relatives to compile such a history.
Today, the site reopens - at https://familyhistory.hhs.gov - after a high-tech facelift.
It's private; users download the information to their own computers. Then they can e-mail a tree-in-progress to relatives to fill in missing information.