My Family Health Portrait

Health care professionals have known for a long time that common diseases—like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes—and even rare diseases—like hemophilia, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell anemia—can run in families. If one generation of a family has high blood pressure, the next generation also may have high blood pressure.

Knowing about any medical conditions your parents, grandparents, and other blood relatives have had can help your doctor predict what medical problems you may have. This information helps you and your doctor take steps to keep you healthy.

The U.S. Surgeon General has created a tool to help make it easy for you to create a portrait of your family's health history. This new tool, called My Family Health Portrait, can be downloaded and printed using your own computer. The tool will help you identify common diseases that may run in your family.

Be sure to take your completed family health portrait with you when you visit your doctor.

Download My Family Health Portrait now.

You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open and print My Family Health Portrait. If you do not already have Acrobat installed on your computer, you can get the free Acrobat Reader here.