3. Complete a family health history
Estimated time to completion: 60-90 minutes
Cost: $0
Getting started on your personal longevity risk assessment is free, but it does take a bit of detective work!
Regardless of which pathway you choose (Budget, Balanced or Premium), you will be asked to complete this exercise. Even if you travel to the fanciest and most premium longevity clinic on the planet (much like Nick does regularly), you will still start with this step!
The purpose of creating the family health history is to inform you of potential longevity risks, based on diseases experienced by related family members (who share your genetics).
To support you, we have created a free family health history questionnaire, which you can download here:
How to use this questionnaire
Once you download our free family health history questionnaire, where to start depends on your age bracket and existing knowledge about your family.
If your parents are still alive, they will be the best place to start the discussion. If not, a surviving aunt or uncle will suit. If you don’t have any surviving older blood relatives, you may need to do a bit of extra investigating. Perhaps with the former doctors or health clinics of your deceased loved ones.
Also included in this form of the questionnaire is the chance to compile your own medical history as a part of this process.
It can take an hour or more to pull this information together, but rest assured that it will pay off. This is one of the most powerful, low-cost tools for longevity risk assessment available.
That is because your family health history directly informs you of both the diseases you may be at risk for and begins to reveal both the likelihood of disease and the potential consequence.
For example, you may find:
Your father has had high blood pressure since his mid 30s and his mother did as well.
This informs you of 1) a disease you may be at risk for developing (hypertension - aka high blood pressure) and 2) its likelihood (both your father and his mother had high blood pressure, making it more likely you may develop it as well
Your maternal uncle and grandfather both died of heart attacks in their 50s
This informs you of three things 1) a disease you may be at risk for developing (cardiovascular disease), 2) its likelihood (two family members in two generations developed this disease) and 3) its consequence (both of them died at a relatively young age).
We will provide you with several helpful detailed examples as we move through this process, which show you how to use this questionnaire.
You can also submit any question you have to us using the Contact Form.
Be sure to list out the consequence of any age related disease in the ‘Your Notes’ column (e.g. heart attack, stroke, loss of mobility, etc).
Next, we introduce a free online disease screening tool which directly compliments the Family Health History exercise, by looking at your individual risk in more detail.
