DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

[stakddek]

From my google news alert:

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http://65.54.170.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=ae5df7053653d38335b5bb4c80b397dd&lat=109995...

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WASHINGTON

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Put health genealogy on the menu this holiday season
By LEE BOWMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
November 08, 2004

WASHINGTON - At family gatherings, talk of the latest ailments is a dinnertime staple. Federal health officials want Americans to take that a bit further over the Thanksgiving weekend and serve up a little health genealogy that could benefit current and future generations.

Knowing who had what type of cancer or developed mental illness at a certain age can be critical information for family members years later, says U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, who Monday announced the initiative to collect family health histories.

"The bottom line is that knowing your family history can save your life," said Carmona. "Millions of dollars in medical research, equipment and knowledge can't give us the information that this simple tool can."

The Department of Health and Human Services has developed a downloadable computer program, "My Family Health Portrait," to help families collect and organize their health histories.

Although most people know that certain illnesses run in families and doctors have long been trained to take family history into account for diagnoses, such data is seldom put together in a thorough, organized manner.

Doctors often lack the time to collect a full accounting of who in a patient's family had what illness. A recent survey done for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that although 96 percent of Americans believe that knowing family health history is important, only a third have ever tried to gather and organize such a history.

"It is our hope that as families gather this holiday season, they'll take the time to learn, and record, their families' health histories so that they can continue to have years of family gatherings together," said Dr. Muin Khoury, director of the CDC's Office of Genomics and Disease Prevention.

As scientists continue to unravel which genetic traits are responsible for various disorders, doctors eventually should be able to determine people's medical risks through DNA tests, said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.

"Until then, tracking illness from one generation of a family to the next can help doctors infer the illnesses for which we are at risk, and thus enable them to create personalized disease-prevention plans."

The computer tool, which uses Windows with the .NET framework installed, guides users through a series of screens to help compile, for each family member, information about six common inheritable diseases, including heart disease, cancer and diabetes, and also lets them add information about other conditions.

After information is collected about grandparents, parents, siblings, children, aunts, uncles and cousins, the program creates a diagram a health professional can use to evaluate the risk for various conditions and to individualize prevention or treatment plans.

The program also lets users add information as it becomes available, and is able to create a diagram for an individual without having complete information about every family member.

HHS officials stressed that once the program is downloaded from the government Web site, it does not send the information entered anywhere else - that the information stays only on the computer's hard drive. Families are encouraged to print out diagrams and share them with family members, who can then pass along copies to their physicians. The software is available in both English and Spanish.

A print version is available through the Federal Citizen Information Center (1-888-878-3256) and at more than 3,600 community health centers nationwide.

For more information about the program or to download, go to www.hhs.gov/familyhistory.




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(Contact Lee Bowman at BowmanL(at)shns.com or online at http://www.shns.com)

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