DNP 810 What model would you use to create a multigenerational family health history for a patient?
When concerning a preferable method of organizing health information, ancestral charts, or rather pedigrees, are greatly useful when addressing inheritance patterns and possible shared environmental risk factors; interpretation of a pedigree can help identify individuals who may be at increased risk for various health problems. A pedigree shows relationships between family members and indicates which individuals have specific variants concerning genetic diseases, traits, or pathogens, coupled with a family’s vital state (Carver et al., 2018; Hickey et al., 2017). In addition, a pedigree can determine disease familial inheritance patterns and thereby serves as a visual representation of how members within one’s family are impacted or not by certain traits of inheritance. This information is essential in calculating the probability that the trait will be inherited in future offspring. We will primarily consider five significant types of inheritance: autosomal dominant (AD), autosomal recessive (AR), X-linked dominant (XD), X-linked recessive (XR), and Y-linked (Y) (Carver et al., 2018; Hickey et al., 2017).
The illustration of pedigrees can undergo considerable efficiency once proper and accurate familial patient-derived history is extracted. Thus, it can be drawn much quicker than recording the information in writing and allows patterns of a disease to emerge as the pedigree is drawn. Since the family history is continually changing, the pedigree can be easily updated on future visits. Circles represent females, and squares represent males (Carver et al., 2018; Hickey et al., 2017). By analyzing a pedigree, we can determine genotypes, identify phenotypes, and predict how a trait will be passed on in the future (Carver et al., 2018; Hickey et al., 2017). Draw any siblings in birth order from left (oldest) to the right (youngest). Siblings are connected by a horizontal line above the symbols, with vertical lines connecting the symbols to the horizontal line (Carver et al., 2018; Hickey et al., 2017). Leave space to add any partners and children. Add aunts, uncles, and grandparents in the same manner (Carver et al., 2018; Hickey et al., 2017).
References
Carver, T., Cunningham, A. P., Babb de Villiers, C., Lee, A., Hartley, S., Tischkowitz, M., … & Antoniou, A. C. (2018). Pedigrees: a web-based graphical pedigree editor. Bioinformatics, 34(6), 1069-1071.
Hickey, K. T., Katapodi, M. C., Coleman, B., Reuter‐Rice, K., & Starkweather, A. R. (2017). Improving utilization of the family history in the electronic health record. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 49(1), 80-86.
