Savvy Senior: Can bad health be inherited?
Dear Savvy Senior,
Can cancer or a heart attack actually be inherited? I just turned 50 last month and am trying to make some healthy changes, and would like to know if tracing my family’s health history is worth the effort.
Fine at 50
Dear Fine,
Just as you can inherit your father’s height or your mother’s eye color, you can also inherit their genetic risk for diseases such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer and more. Here’s what you should know.
Family History
An accurate family medical history can be one of your most important tools to help keep yourself healthy. Since most diseases have both environmental and genetic components, your family’s health history can provide you and your doctor a genetic road map to your strengths and weaknesses, which can help you recognize, and even fend off, inheritable illnesses in their early stages.
Tracking your History
To collect your family’s medical history, you’ll need some basic medical facts about your parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and even first cousins. Talk with them and get the specific ages when family members developed health problems like heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, osteoporosis, asthma, blindness, deafness, depression, alcoholism and more. Also, if family members are deceased, find out when and how they died. Some relatives may not want to share their medical histories or they may not know their family history, but whatever information you discover will be helpful. A good resource to help you find your ancestor’s unknown medical history is their death certificate, which you can acquire from your state health department (see www.cdc.gov/nchs/howto/w2w/w2welcom.htm). Death certificates list the cause of death and your relative’s age at death.
Increased Risks
Having a parent or sibling with a particular disease doesn’t mean you’ll get it too, but statistically, your odds of developing it can about double. And, if two or more cases occur in the same immediate family, the odds can increase by fourfold or more. Some additional factors that can increase your risks are:
‘ If a family member gets a disease 10 to 20 years before most people get them (for example, getting heart disease at age 35).
‘ A disease that does not usually affect a certain gender (for example, breast cancer in a man).
‘ A family member that gets certain combinations of diseases (for example, breast and ovarian cancer, or heart disease and diabetes).
Dealing with History
If you discover that a serious health problem runs in your family, don’t despair. While you can’t change your genes, you can change your habits to increase your chances of a healthy future. By eating a healthy diet, exercising and not smoking, you can offset and sometimes even neutralize your genetic vulnerabilities. This is especially true for heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and osteoporosis. A family medical history can also alert you to get early and frequent screening tests, which can help you detect other problems (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and cancers like breast, ovarian, prostrate and colon cancer) in their early stages when they’re most treatable.
Savvy Resource
The U.S. Surgeon General offers a free program at www.hhs.gov/familyhistory called “My Family Health Portrait,” that will help you create and organize your medical family tree and help you identify common diseases that may run in your family. The program can also be printed out into an easy-to-read form that you can give to your doctor or family members. If you don’t have access to the Internet, you can also get a free paper version sent to you by calling 888-275-4772.
Send your senior questions to: Savvy Senior, P.O. Box 5443, Norman, OK 73070, or visit www.savvysenior.org. Jim Miller is a regular contributor to the NBC Today Show and author of “The Savvy Senior” book.