Do you believe most things like disease or defects are hereditary?!
Question: Do you believe most things like disease or defects are hereditary!?
i was told meniere's disease isn't passed on,but my father's sister has it and my father has it and now i was diagnosed with meniere's disease!.!.how can that not be hereditary!?!.they also claimed all these years that ventricular septal defects weren't hereditary either but now i got a letter in the mail from children's hospital wanting me to volunteer to let them do genetic testing on my daughter and my sister -in-law got the same letter because both of our children have the same defect and our husbands are identical twins and have a family history of heart trouble!.Www@Answer-Health@Com
Answers:
Often they don't know if a disease is hereditary or not until they do genetic testing on families who have a history of the same disease or similar diseases!. Case in point, my grandmother has Juvenile macular degeneration, she was diagnosed with it about 65 yrs ago!. Had no familial history of the disease, (indeed it had only been discovered in 1903 by Karl Stargardt) now, fast forward to this summer one of my children has been diagnosed with it in July, fast forward again to last week, another one of my 3 children have been diagnosed with it as well!. Now in my frantic search for information over the past few months, digging for cures etc (which by the way, there are none) I find that in 1997 they found that the ABCR4 gene is the gene responsible for this disease, it contains a defect which causes the inability of the macula (which is a small area of the retina used for fine detail focusing) to remove a fatty waste from the area, thus causing an buildup or deposits of this waste material, which in turn destroys the photoreceptor cells in the macula causing a permanant loss of central vision!. If the scientists had not tested families and people with this disease they would not have identified the gene that causes it!. With the identification of genes that cause these and other diseases we can find out if we are at risk of passing these things on to our children and on down the line!. I can't tell you what I would have done had I known I carried a recessive gene for this eye disease, which considering the year they found out was too late anyway, my children that were affected by this were already born!. But at least they know they are carriers and they can choose to have the genetic testing done for this and other things with their future spouses!. I would consider letting your daughter participate in the testing, usually they only need a blood sample to do the test!. And then when or if they find a connection, you and she will know!.Www@Answer-Health@Com
I guess basically what causes the disease is hereditary in ur family but to me it sure does sound like it's hereditary in ur family!. Doctors don't know much about this disease yet that why they want ya'll to do the testing!.Www@Answer-Health@Com
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