You already know that family history can play a role in your health. You may even have made a family medical history to share with your doctor so that they can work with you to reduce your disease risk. Genetics certainly does play an important role in determining our health and forecasting potential health risks.
There is another layer to the whole health and heritability thing, though. Epigenetics is the study of whether or not inherited genes are expressed, and it could provide powerful information about disease risk and prevention. Epigenetics deals largely with the effect of environmental factors on whether or not particular genes are expressed in the individuals that have inherited them.
As part of understanding epigenetics, it is important to understand that the term “environmental factors” encompasses far more than things like pollutants and chemical exposures. It includes everything from a parent’s age at the birth of their child to the food you eat and just about everything else besides genetic mutations. While epigenetics can be a very complex topic – I have a little bit of a background in biology and could not even make sense out of the Wikipedia definition – the underlying message is that your genes alone do not seal your fate. Certain risk factors may play more of a role than others in whether a person develops a specific health condition, and that information could help people who are at risk for developing that condition to determine what they can do to decrease their risk of developing it.
Now that you know a little about what epigenetics is, you can understand how it can give hope to people whose family histories contain genes that they fear may affect them later in life. For example, I recently learned that a study about epigenetics and breast cancer is now underway. Hopefully that study will provide some information about how breast cancer works and how it can be prevented.