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Huntington's Disease
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The modern era of medicine has placed the tools of genetic research at the fore front of many scientists' research efforts.
Fewer diseases cry out for a need for genetic testing and understanding more than Huntington's Disease, also known as Huntington's chorea.
This condition is marked by loss of speaking and thinking abilities, changes in personality, an unsteady walk and a general uncontrollable twitching throughout the body and face.
In fact, chorea is the Greek word for 'dance' which refers to the sufferer's tendency to have their physical facilities dance out of the control of the patient.
The sad fact of the condition is that it leads to the carriers' death one hundred percent of the time.
Huntington's Disease, named after George Huntington who was able to describe the condition in 1872, is contracted genetically, that is, it is received at birth from parents genes and cannot be acquired at random by people later in their lives.
The incidence of the condition in the general population is somewhere between five and eight per one hundred thousand people. The condition is handed down on the dominant gene allele which means that if one of an offspring's parents carries the trait in their genes then the child has a fifty percent chance of acquiring the disease.
If both parents carry the gene then the child will be guaranteed to contract Huntington's Disease. It hardly seems fair to a child that hasn't even begun to know the world yet.
Although no cure is at this time available there have been some successes in laboratory work that do lend hope to those that may be suffering from this disease. Currently most Huntington's sufferers don't manifest symptoms until their fourth decade of life.
This allows for genetic testing to potentially discover carriers who submit to the tests. For those that want to know and do find out that they have the disease the awareness can be equivalent to that of a death sentence, which essentially it is.
On the flip side it could open doors to new drug testing for the patient that might not only bring hope to themselves but to the lives of future sufferers.
More information is available from The Huntington's Disease Society of America (www.hdsa.org) and the UK based Huntington's Disease Association (www.hda.org.uk).
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