An old photo might get the conversation started. Or a piece of paper, marking a relative's entrance into the world or departure from it.
If those dear to you are gathering this Christmas, you might consider taking advantage of the captive audience by collecting information about the health of your relatives. An aunt might have had breast cancer, or an uncle had a bad heart. Someone might have struggled with chronic depression, the kind of issue that gets swept under the rug in many families.
The holidays are a good time to discuss your family's health history.
ADVERTISEMENT
Finding health patterns that dot the family tree like invisible ornaments is important. Every piece of information could be useful in spotting and treating an otherwise unforeseen illness.
"That knowledge can really dictate the decisions you make when it comes to your own health," said Dr. Nick Shamie, a spine surgeon and expert in orthopedic medicine at the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica.
A range of maladies, from color blindness and hemophilia to heart diseases and cancer (including breast and colon) can be influenced by heredity. Often a genetic mutation can cause a condition to be passed down from one generation to the next.
"What I tell patients all the time is, the best thing you can do for your health is pick the right parents," Shamie said. "It's a good joke, because it makes people think, and sometimes it makes people happy because they have really healthy parents who lived to 90 or 100. Or people get upset because they had a father who died at age 50 of a heart attack.
"The story of life is playing cards: You're dealt a hand, but you can trade cards out by doing what is good for you."
Someone with a family history of heart disease, for example, might become more motivated to exercise and watch his cholesterol, while a woman whose mother and aunt had breast cancer might be inclined to ignore the academic debate over mammography and get screened earlier than a woman with no such family history.
Get them talking
Getting family members to talk about their own health, and the health of their loved ones, isn't easy.
"One of the most important things is making the narrator feel comfortable," said Stephanie George, the archivist for Cal State Fullerton's Center for Oral and Public History. The center has amassed more than 5,100 recorded interviews, about matters large and small, since 1968 and teaches classes on the craft of conducting oral histories.
Try to set aside time for an interview, "away from the festivities," George said. Begin with simple questions about holiday traditions and where the family lived at various points in time.
You never know what details will be germane. A 2010 study suggested that asthma, which can be caused by environmental pollution, might suppress the functionality of a certain gene, increasing the chances that asthma will be inherited by that person's children.
Get multiple perspectives. A mother-daughter relationship might be complicated, which would affect the information delivered. An aunt or cousin who is "a little bit removed" from a situation might be easier, George said.
Going high-tech
Genealogy companies are offering more than just printable family trees and death certificates these days. Ancestry.com offers a DNA test for $199, and 23andMe.com charges $99.
George bought a kit and got it back in 10 days.
"It does two things: It's important for people who are interested in tracking blood relatives, who are already interested in genealogy," she said. "But it also offers you this medical report. It tells you what your physical makeup is."
She was able to determine whether her genotype makes her more predisposed toward diseases like breast cancer, Parkinson's or even Alzheimer's.
"According to the odds calculator when I first did the DNA test, 0.80 out of 100 women of European ethnicity who share my genotype will develop breast cancer between the ages of 50 and 54," said George, who turned 55 this week and whose ancestors are German, Irish and English. The average, the test said, is 1.3 out of 100. "So I have a reduced risk of developing breast cancer than the general population."
Touchy subjects
Alcoholism, mental retardation and mental illness all could have a hereditary component, but these conditions might be the most difficult for families to come to terms with and discuss, even years later.
Dr. Rimal Bera, a clinical professor of psychiatry and human behavior at UC Irvine, says families might still be ashamed to discuss a relative who had a mental illness like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or depression.
"It's not a 100 percent genetic linkage, but family history does play a role as one of the primary risk factors," Bera said. "So being able to obtain a family history, being able to openly discuss that and not hide from that, is of great importance, not only for each family to understand the risk, but for medical professionals."
Since mental illnesses were so poorly understood in the past, and often kept hidden in the shadows, discussing peculiar behaviors of a family member can be crucial to understanding the illness and being able to treat a current condition, if one exists.
"These are the things that can hurt future generations ? to put blinders on about information that can help the whole family," Shamie said. "That's part of our culture, isn't it? We don't want to talk about problems; we just want to look at the positive. Sometimes you have to face problems head on and take some actions to prevent them from happening again.
"It's like history class: If you don't know your history, you don't know how to avoid problems in the future, because history repeats itself."
Contact the writer: lhall@ocregister.com or 714-796-2221
Source: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/family-381197-history-breast.html
jordan hill tony nominations dark knight trailer delmon young dallas mavericks washington capitals amare stoudemire
কোন মন্তব্য নেই:
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন