Why You Need To Know More About Your Family’s Medical History

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obtaining a family medical history

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Here’s the information you should gather

The more specific you can be in detailing your family’s medical history to your doctor, the better they can plan your treatment. “The ideal situation is we hear, ‘Aunt Lucy had breast cancer at age 40.’ That’s helpful. To take it a step further, did Aunt Lucy have surgery, and that’s it? Or did she have to do chemo and radiation? That also gives us a cue into the kind of disease the aunt has,” Powell says. “Any cancers you definitely want to know specifically what organ did it affect, what age was the diagnosis, and then, what treatment did they have? Knowing simple things like, after your aunt was diagnosed with cancer, did she live much longer after? Did she die from the cancer? Those things are important.”

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