Mapping Family History Can Lead More At-Risk Patients to Timely Screening

Contact: Samiha Khanna Phone: [phone] Email: [e-mail] https://www.dukemedicine.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE at 11 a.m. (ET) on Thursday, March 3, 2016
DURHAM, N.C. -- Most doctors and nurses review a patient’s family history to identify risk factors for heart disease and cancer, often through a paper checklist or brief interview.
But more deliberate efforts to map a patient’s family tree could identify additional risks and drive patients to more timely screenings, according to a new study from Duke Health.
The study, published March 3 in the journal Genetics in Medicine, recruited 488 patients at two community clinics in Greensboro, N.C., to use a web-based program called MeTree to map their family health history.
MeTree was designed specifically for the study and provided recommendations on five specific conditions: thrombosis, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, colorectal cancer, and hereditary cancer syndrome. Of the 174 cases in which patients were at increased risk, only two had previously undergone more in-depth monitoring of their health for the diseases they were at risk for.
Authors found an unexpected benefit, said lead author Lori Orlando, M.D., an associate professor of medicine at Duke and associate director of the Duke Center for Applied Genomics and Precision Medicine. An in-depth family history, which took about 25 minutes to complete, also identified patients who assumed they were at high risk for disease, but weren’t.
“Some people who wer...

Source: DukeHealth.org: Duke Health Features - March 3, 2016 Category: Pediatrics Tags: Duke Medicine Source Type: news