Huntington's Disease Research Paper

- Huntington’s disease is caused by an abnormal dominant gene. Also called Huntington’s chorea, it is a complex disorder that affects a person capability to feel, think and move. The symptoms of Huntington’s disease consist of mood swings, irritability, depression, and anger. These symptoms are likely to worsen and the disease a lot of times runs in the family. If people have at least one parent with Huntington’s disease, the chances of them inheriting it are 50-50 chance. There is also a 50-50 chance that, that same person could pass the faulty gene on to their future child. This pattern of inheritance is called "autosomal dominant". The disease could also affect a person’s judgment and other mental functions. In some cases the person could

A lot depends on whether the person wanting children knows what their gene status is or not. So it’s good for couples to be tested before they have children in order to find out if there even is a risk of passing the disease on to their children. Like it was mentioned a person that has a Huntington's disease affected parent has a 50% risk of having inherited the Huntington's disease gene. As a result each child of that person has a 25% chance of inheriting the condition. But that '25%' only applies while the person is untested. If a person has been tested and the results came back negative that means that they will not get Huntington's disease and will not pass it onto their children. However, if a person has tested positive, that means that at some point in their life they will develop Huntington’s disease, and each child will have a 50% risk of inheriting the condition. If the women is 10-15 weeks pregnant with child then the couple should try prenatal testing. Prenatal testing involve testing a fetus to see if it has the expanded gene that causes Huntington's disease. It is only usually done when a couple is certain that they'll terminate the pregnancy if the genetic test is positive. That decision would have to be made beforehand. That's because testing a pregnancy, but not going ahead with a termination if the result came back positive, would take

Down syndrome symptoms vary from person to person, and there are different types of symptoms. There are Physical symptoms which include: Decreased or poor muscle tone, Short neck, with excess skin at the back of the neck, Small head, ears, and mouth. And there are Intellectual and Developmental Symptoms which is cognitive damage, problems with thinking and learning is common in people that have Down syndrome. Other cognitive problems may include short attention span, poor judgment, impulsive behavior and slow learning.

- Down syndrome can be caused by a random error in cell division which results in a presence of an extra copy of chromosome 21. This type of error is called nondisjunction. Usually when one cell divides in two, pairs of chromosomes are split so that one of the pair goes to one cell, and the other from the pair goes to the other cell. In nondisjunction something happens that makes both chromosomes from one pair go into one cell and no chromosome from that pair goes into the other cell. A lot of the time, the error occurs at random during the formation of an egg or sperm. After a lot of research is has been discovered that in more than 90% of cases, the extra copy of chromosome 21 comes from the mother in the