Is There a Risk of Disease Lurking in Your Family Medical Records?

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Is There a Risk of Disease Lurking in Your Family Medical Records?

Is There a Risk of Disease Lurking in Your Family Medical Records?

Medical records are crucial for tracking your health history. Everything from a broken bone as a child to a serious bout of pneumonia or diagnosis of diabetes is coded and recorded in your files. While this is important for your health, it can also improve the health outlook of your family as well. That is because medical records track genetic conditions, things that future generations might be predisposed to. A new study took a unique new approach on this in an attempt to highlight disease risk without even venturing into the complicated topic of studying DNA.

Who is your emergency contact?

This is the question that researchers asked to conduct their study. Instead of the need to do costly DNA analysis, they simply looked at the emergency contact listed on over 2 million medical records. The idea occurred to them that there’s data stored by health facilities that typically overlap. A patient’s emergency contact, which is often a blood relative, is one of those pieces of information. In fact, the researchers found that over one-third of the listed emergency contacts had also come to the same medical facility for treatment. By cross referencing names, contact information, addresses, and known relationships, the researchers were able to connect 223,000 family trees using blood relatives listed as emergency contacts. One of these family trees actually has over 100 patients on in across four different generations.

Taking this information, the researchers then overlaid it with health conditions derived from the coding in their medical records. This then enabled them to estimate the heritability of over 500 traits and diseases. They researchers found that they were able to trace genetic predisposition in many of the conditions and diseases. For example, they found that high levels of high-density lipoprotein are 50% inherited, while the more dangerous kind of cholesterol is 25% inherited.

Why does this study matter?

So, why does this study actually matter? This study is important because it allows for the construction of family trees laced with medical data that don’t rely on memory. The most common way to build a family medical history is through interviewing patients, but most don’t know or remember the conditions that their parents, grandparents and great grandparents had. Although there is the issue of privacy, this study has the potential to help predict predisposed conditions which will enable physicians to provide better, more informed medical care.

Do you need copies of your medical records?

If you would like to piece together your own version of a family medical history, Datafied can help. We offer medical record retrieval services through our division of Order Medical Records. At Order Medical Records, you can quickly and easily submit an inquiry for your medical records right online from the comfort of your own home. You can also encourage family members to do the same and work together to improve the overall health outlook of your family for generations to come. To learn more or submit an order for medical records, visit us online at Datafied.


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