Huntington's Disease

Adriana Singer
CPABiology 8
5-4-2007
Huntington’s disease way named after George Huntington in 1872 after he wrote a precise description of Huntington’s Disease in his first medical paper. However in the last few decades HD (Huntington’s disease) has been heavily researched. This information tells us that 8 in every one hundred thousand people have the disease. However, one in twenty thousand people in western Europe have the disease while one in one million have the disease in Africa and Asia. It is also not gender bias, in other words it is about fifty percent males and fifty percent females.
There are two problems when diagnosing this disease. The first is not many people know what HD is and second, the symptoms. The symptoms include involuntary movement, memory loss, behavior and emotional changes. these are hard to recognize as HD because they are subtle and not noticeable it you are not looking for the symptoms. The one thing that remains is that this Disease is, unfortunately, fatal.
This disease is caused by an increase of the code C,A,G, repetition in the huntingtin gene on the fourth chromosome. There are normally nine to thirty-five repeats in the code, but in HD there are thirty-six to one-hundred-twenty-one repeats. The number of repeats is directly linked with when symptoms start to show. Like if you have between thirty-six and forty repeats, symptoms may never happen. Your parents may not even have the disease and you could still have it. This happens when the father has between twenty-seven and thirty-five repeats. What happens is more repeats are created with the chromosome is in the sperm or in early embryo. This only happens if the father has a high number of repeats. However, the more common way is either the mother, father or both have the gene and they pass it on to their children.
Unfortunately there is no cure for the disease. However, there are treatments for the symptoms. Anti-depressants for depression, anti-conversant for the involuntary movement and other medications like these. There is also no way to prevent the disease. However, IVF allows a test to see if the embryo will have HD. This is a simply DNA test that copies the repeats and sees if they are larger then normal huntingtin genes. This test is 99% accurate and is much easier than the old version of testing.

http://medgen.genetics.utah.edu/photographs/diseases/high/cns239.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington%27s_disease
http://www.ygyh.org/hd/whatisit.htm