Recording a Familial Medical History or Pedigree

Abstract

A careful and detailed health-history of the family is the basic prerequisite for any form of genetic counseling. It remains essential to have detailed information about the proband’s relatives even when the proband himself is clearly suffering from a genetic defect of which the mode of inheritance has, ostensibly, been established. In genetics, there is always the possibility that a particular family will prove to be an exception. It happens, for instance, that a genetic defect, generally considered as autosomal-recessive, will be passed on as dominant in some families.