What is your risk for cancer and/or heart disease? The James Family Health Risk Calculator (familyhealthriskcalculator.osumc.edu) is a free and easy-to-use online tool that allows people to calculate their risk of cancer and heart disease based on their family’s medical history. In this episode, Kevin Sweet, MS, LGC, a James genetic counselor, explains the history of the calculator (this is the third generation of this valuable tool), the importance of knowing your family’s medical history and sharing this information with your primary care physician. “If someone is at a higher risk, we can start screening them earlier and more often,” Sweet said, adding this can prevent some types of cancer and lead to better outcomes in other cancers that are detected in the early stages. The James Family Health Risk Calculator was designed to be user friendly. Participants can “choose to do both cancer and heart disease at the same time or one at a time and add to it later when they get more family history,” Sweet explained. People with a higher-than-average risk can print out the results, share them with their physician and decide whether genetic testing and counseling and increased screenings are the next steps. “We follow national guidelines to determine risk and have also developed our own algorithms for more rare cancer mutations, and we worked with the [Ohio State] Ross Heart Hospital people to updates our algorithms for heart disease,” Sweet said.