We all have much to thank our parents for. Just letting us grow up for starters. However, heredity is one of the ‘clues’ to your health in the future, and what you can do to enjoy a long, lively and healthy one. This is where the gene pool comes in.

With the increasing research into genetics, we are able to map out our likely futures and can predict such ailments as diabetes, epilepsy and other neurological problems like Huntington’s Chorea and Alzheimer’s Disease, some cancers such as breast, ovarian, lower bowel, prostate, skin and testicular, heart attacks and blood pressure problems.

However, you do not need to have multi-million baht DNA examinations done to see where you are headed, all you need to do is to start asking the older family members about your inheritance. Not the money - your genetic inheritance in the health stakes.

Why does the questionnaire for life insurance ask whether any member of your family ever suffered from diabetes, epilepsy and other ailments and then also asks you to write down how old your parents or brothers and sisters were when they died, and what they died from? They are finding out the relative likelihood (or ‘risk’) of your dying early to an easily identifiable disease. This does not need a Masters degree in rocket science. It needs an application of family history.

If either of your parents had diabetes, your elder brother has diabetes, your younger brother has diabetes and your cousin has diabetes, what are the odds on your having diabetes? And yet, I see families like this, where the individual members are totally surprised and amazed when they fall ill, go to hospital, and diabetes is diagnosed.

It does not really take very much time over a family lunch to begin to enquire about one’s forebears. After five minutes it will be obvious if there is some kind of common medical thread running through your family. That thread may not necessarily be life threatening, but could be something like arthritis for example.

Look at it this way - your future is being displayed by your family’s past. This could be considered frightening, when your father, his brother and your grandfather all died very early from heart attacks. Or, this could be considered as life saving, if it pushes you towards looking at you own cardiac health and overcoming an apparently disastrous medical history. In my family, for example, no male before me ever saw his 57th birthday. With that knowledge I take good care of my cardiac risk factors. Going back to the family with diabetes, if it were me, I would be having my blood sugar checked at least once a year from the age of 20. We are talking about a very inexpensive test that could literally save you millions of baht in the future, as well as giving you a better quality of life, and a longer one.

Ask around the dinner table today and plan to check your medical future tomorrow. It’s called a ‘Check-up’!

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