Your Genealogy Affects Your Health
Know Your Family Tree
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About the Book
Due to the recent advances in genetic knowledge, your family history has become far more crucial to understanding your health than simply for tracing your ancestry. Author Clarke Fraser, Canada's first medical geneticist, uses his extensive knowledge, wisdom, and wit to show the relationship between your genealogy and genetic diseases. Your Genealogy Affects Your Health: Know Your Family Tree itemize the genetic and environmental factors that increase or reduce the risks for common familial disorders.
Most genealogists do not record the important facts, like what diseases people had. Fraser tells how becoming familiar with your family's history of disease shows what steps you can take to reduce your risk of getting a close relative's particular disorder. He offers timely information on topics such as:- how genes work
- how to draw a pedigree
- how DNA is used to trace your ancestry
- how normal traits such as handedness, baldness and intelligence run in families
- how common disorders such as cancer, obesity, coronary disease, alcoholism and schizophrenia run in families
About the Author
Clarke Fraser, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Human Genetics at McGill University, Montreal, had a long and distinguished career of research and teaching in human genetics, and helped develop the field of genetic counseling. He now lives, with his wife. Marilyn Preus, in his ancestral home in Nova Scotia.