By Cassie Lucas-Moore, Marketing & Outreach Coordinator
Genealogy is a fun pastime where you can find out interesting facts about your family members and your heritage. It can also provide a very important component of family history that everyone needs to know: medical history.
Several health conditions are caused by genetic sources. Knowing the history of medical situations of close family members is necessary to ensure that medical professionals can treat you accordingly, and assess whether medical testing is needed to determine risk or prevention measures should be put into place.
While you don’t have to go too deep into genealogy, you will still need to know hereditary health problems and causes of death for at least three generations (to your grandparents, and great-grandparents, if available). The main conditions to track are cancer, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, mental illness, high blood pressure, stroke, kidney disease, alcoholism, birth defects, learning disabilities, and vision or hearing loss.
The best way to determine medical history is through interviews, not through popular online genealogy tests, which are purely for entertainment purposes. Talk with your parents, siblings, and their children. Parents typically have information about grandparents and even great-grandparents. You can always reach out to aunts or uncles.
Unfortunately, interviewing is not always an option. For those who may not have family contact or the ability to talk with someone, other places to find pertinent medical information are death certificates, obituaries, insurance records, military records, and hospital records.
Genetic testing is another option for discovering medical background information. However, be very aware of potential scams. Genetic testing is a known target for Medicare scammers, who often have people sign a form saying “if my insurance won’t pay, I can be billed.” People do not realize these tests can cost thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars. Health insurances will ONLY cover genetic testing if a doctor has seen you face-to-face and determined there is a strong medical need for this very expensive testing. Scammers not only cost you lots of money, they may also give you false results that they can then use to sell you “cures” or harvest your information to resell to other scammers.
Being informed about your family history, especially your family medical history, is important for preventive action for your health as you age. We recommend you have conversations with several generations of your family to gain this information. If needed, you can go directly to the doctor for genetic testing, but never online. Now that you have concrete steps you can take to explore your genealogy, you can feel confident in your health risks moving forward.