Talking to mum

When it comes to your health one of the best things you can do is sit down and have a chat with your mum about her health. It probably wasn’t the answer you were expecting, but it’s true. So why is asking your mum about her past and current health such an important thing to do?

“A huge amount of stuff [relating to] women’s health is hereditary,” says Dr Ciara Kelly.

“Very often we would go through the menopause at the same time and in the same way as our mothers. We might have started our periods at the same time and in the same way as our mothers… so very often we mirror, reproductively, our mothers as well from a health perspective and certainly from a disease perspective. Things like breast cancer, for example, would have a strong hereditary factor so from that point of view I think it is really important.”

Dr Kelly, who is the resident medical expert on RTE’s Operation Transformation and the host of Alive and Kicking on Newstalk says that while it can be difficult trying to remember health history, it is essential to speak to your mum.

“I know talking to my own mother her answer to everything was, ‘I can’t remember,’ which I used to find quite frustrating… but I do think it’s important and I think it’s a good thing for you to sit down with your mum. It’s a nice generational bonding thing.”

So what kind of questions should we be asking our mum?

THE MENOPAUSE

Dr Kelly says that as well as asking your mum about her menstrual cycle and when she started her first period, it’s important to ask her about the menopause. The first question you should ask? What age she went through it.

“That’s probably one of the big questions [about the menopause] and then just how was it for them? 70 per cent of women will have quite bad symptoms but a third of women will barely notice. Very often we’ll mirror [our mum]. So if your mum had a horrendous menopause at 45 and was flushing and having a terrible time, if you’re 44 and starting to lose sleep and get night sweats and all of that, it may be that you’re going into the menopause. I think age and what kind of symptoms they had is very useful.”

CANCER

We are likely to know whether our mum has had cancer or not, but it’s still important to speak to your mum about it – especially if her cancer was gynaecological or in her breast.

“Ovarian, uterine, breast – all of those are cancers you should know about for sure,” says Dr Kelly.

“But then there are other ones that aren’t just to do with your mum. Bowel cancer has a strong hereditary factor. Lung cancer can do, although it’s more closely related to smoking.”

HEART DISEASE

While the menopause and cancer are two of the biggest offenders, Dr Kelly points out that it’s also important to ask your parents (not just your mum) about illnesses like heart disease as these can run in families and may come from your mum’s or your dad’s side.

“It’s very unusual for a woman under the age of 65 to have heart disease. If a woman in your family has had heart disease below the age of 65 that’s highly significant,” says Dr Kelly.

MENTAL HEALTH

As well as being aware of physical illnesses, it’s also important to question your mum about her mental health as this too can hold important information.

“I think it is important to say, ‘Did you ever get stressed mum? Would you ever suffer with anxiety? Were you ever low?’ It’s amazing when you talk to people. I’ve often talked to older women who I’m not related to about their health because that’s what I do for a living, and they’ll often tell me about post-natal depression that they had that they never told anyone about. They tried to hide it and get through it and say nothing.

“I think those are very important questions. The question is whether or not you’re going to get a truthful answer if someone has hid it. I think asking in a nice, open and a supportive way might be a really good conversation to have between a mother and daughter,” says Dr Kelly.

“One in 10 women have quite bad post-natal depression. Particularly if you’re going down that line of having kids yourself, it might be useful to know this about your mum. Not necessarily because you’re going to [get it] because she did but because it’s a source of support and understanding that maybe you didn’t even know was there.”

HAVING THE CONVERSATION

So how should you go about having this type of health-related conversation with your mother? Dr Kelly advises speaking to them as a peer.

“I think sometimes, even as adults, we talk to our parents as if we’re children and they’re the grown-ups. I think having a conversation like this is very much peer to peer or woman to woman, more than mother to daughter…

“I think mums are people too and I say sometimes that I do think as children of parents, we’re guilty of seeing them in a very fixed way. When you look at your parents who might be older and greying and all of that kind of stuff, they may well have, depending on what age you are having this conversation, have had you younger than you are now and they may have gone through all sorts of stuff and struggles and I think it’s a very good and grown-up conversation to have with your parents.”

Dr Kelly says that we need to realise just what a great resource of information, health and life-related, our parents are.

“I just got huge respect for my parents after I had children and it suddenly dawned on me how much they had done and how much they had experienced that I never really understood and therefore, how much good advice and wisdom they had to impart around everything from child rearing to periods to menopause.

“The other thing that parents have done that we haven’t is lost lots of people. They’ve lost their own parents. They’ve lost friends because they’re older and I think because of that they’re a huge resource that’s there for us.”

DON’T FORGET

To sum up, it’s important to sit down and have a chat with your mum about her health history… but what about dad?

“Bear in mind that you can inherit things like heart disease and cancer from your dad just as easily as you can from your mum.”