Can you have the gene for huntingtons but not have the disease?!
Question: There is a lot of confusion going on in this thread.... Huntington's Chorea is a DOMINANT disorder, that means you only need to inherit one copy of the affected gene to have the disorder. This is not the case with a lot of other genetic disorders like haemophilia, sickle cell anaemia and cystic fibrosis, which are RECESSIVE disorders, where you have to inherit two copies of the affected gene to have the condition.
Most people with Huntington's Chorea will not express symptoms of the disease until middle age, so it is very possible to be a fit and healthy person in their 20s, who still carries a copy of this gene and will have the disease in later life. There is some issue to do with penetrance (expressing the disease), and the number of repeats of a sequence in the gene required to develop the disease, but anyone who is told they have the gene for Huntington's Chorea will develop the disease (because with a shorter number of repeats, it is not known as Huntington's Chorea).
Answers: There is a lot of confusion going on in this thread.... Huntington's Chorea is a DOMINANT disorder, that means you only need to inherit one copy of the affected gene to have the disorder. This is not the case with a lot of other genetic disorders like haemophilia, sickle cell anaemia and cystic fibrosis, which are RECESSIVE disorders, where you have to inherit two copies of the affected gene to have the condition.
Most people with Huntington's Chorea will not express symptoms of the disease until middle age, so it is very possible to be a fit and healthy person in their 20s, who still carries a copy of this gene and will have the disease in later life. There is some issue to do with penetrance (expressing the disease), and the number of repeats of a sequence in the gene required to develop the disease, but anyone who is told they have the gene for Huntington's Chorea will develop the disease (because with a shorter number of repeats, it is not known as Huntington's Chorea).
my son says no, it is a dominant allele[gene] if you have the allele then you will have the disease. he has just done about this in gcse bio
Yes, you can be a carrier of the gene. It's an inherited disease and only some family members get it, like haemophilia
P.S. Well, you can possess the allele that causes the disease, but only if there are two of that allele, because it is recessive.
The short answer is no. The longer answer is, no, because Huntington's is expressed as a dominant gene, which means that you only need one copy of the defective gene in order to get the disease. This is one of those diseases, though, that usually doesn't produce any symptoms until middle age or later, which unfortunately means that this gene can be passed on to children before any manifestation of it occurs in the parent(s).
Huntington's is recessive, so you only need one of the genes to have it. (Hh)
So no, you can't :)
sometimes.....the pattern for genetic diseases is 25% chance of the disease 50% chance of being a carrier 25% chance of not having the disease...its to do with the x and y chromosomes....and male female gendering......there really appears little logic to it
The mother or father has a family history of genetic disorders. Common examples of inherited genetic disorders include cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and Tay-Sachs disease. In most cases, these diseases can affect your baby only if both you and your partner carry genes for the disease.If you have a family history of such diseases, a genetic counselor may recommend blood tests to see if you or your partner are "carriers," which means you could pass on the genes. If neither of you are carriers for a particular disease, your child is likely to be safe. If one of you is a carrier, your child won't get the disease, but he could be a carrier himself. (A few conditions, such as Huntington's disease, require only one faulty gene, so your child could get the disease even if only one parent is a carrier.)
If both of you are carriers, there's generally a one in four chance that your child will have the disease and a 50 percent chance that the child will be a carrier who exhibits no symptoms. (The odds will be greater for diseases like Huntington's -- about 50 percent higher if one parent has a gene for it, and 75 percent if both parents do.) After the baby is conceived, amniocentesis, CVS, or a similar screening test can usually determine whether the baby actually has the disease.
The gene for Huntington's in dominant. So no, if you have it, you have it. It is not recessive like hemophilia, I don't know where other people are getting their info. Check this out: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/bhdc/abou...
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Genes for diseases can be either dominant or recessive. The gene for Huntington's disease is dominant. Therefore, most HD sufferers have one copy of the expanded gene and one copy of the normal gene. Each child of an affected parent has a 50/50 chance of getting an expanded copy of the gene, and therefore has a 50% chance of inheriting the disease. On the other hand, if a person with a parent suffering from HD does not inherit the mutant gene, they cannot pass it on to anyone else."