title: It's Interpersonal: Family Relationships, Genetic Risk, and Caregiving.
abstract: My research program considers family relationships across the life course: in early life, with a focus on disease prevention-leveraging genetic risk information and relationships to motivate health-promoting behaviors-and in later life, with a focus on informal caregiving-identifying characteristics of those most vulnerable to, or resilient from, caregiver stress. It is fortuitous, if not tragic, then, that my research and personal worlds collided during my mother's final 8 months of life. Here, I discuss how this experience has shifted my thinking within both arms of my research program. First, I consider the state of the science in family health history, arguing that the current approach which focuses on an individual's first- and second-degree relatives does not take us far enough into the relational landscape to activate communal coping with disease risk. Second, I discuss caregiving from a family systems perspective. My family's experience confirmed the importance of using a systems approach and highlighted a need to identify underlying variability in members' expectations of caregiving roles. In so doing, I capture the significance of understanding the multiple perspectives that frame a context in which families adapt and cope with risk and disease diagnoses.
authors: Social and Behavioral Research Branch, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. koehlyl@mail.nih.gov.
authors: Laura M
authors: LM
authors: Koehly
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D017028:Caregivers / Q000523:psychology*; D005192:Family Health; D005195:Family Relations / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D030342:Genetic Diseases, Inborn / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009679:Nuclear Family / Q000523:psychology; D018570:Risk Assessment; D012944:Social Support; D013315:Stress, Psychological
keywords: Communal coping; Family conflict; Social networks; Social support