Huntingtons Disease

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Term Paper Title	Huntingtons Disease
# of Words	677
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	2.71

Huntington's Disease

Huntington's Disease

     Huntington's disease, or Huntngton's chorea, is a genetic disease that
causes selective neural cell death, which results in chorea, or irregular,
jerking movements of the limbs caused by involuntary muscle contractions, and
dementia.  It can cause a lack of concentration and depression.  It also may
cause atrophy of the caudate nucleus, a part of the brain.  However, symptoms
vary between individuals, with some sufferers showing symptoms that others do
not.  Those suffering from Huntington's disease normally begin displaying
symptoms between the ages of 30 and 50, but has been known to show itself in
people as young as two and as old as 80.
     Huntington's disease is inehrited from one of the victim's parents.
Since the gene for HD is dominant, there is a 50% chance of a sufferer's
offspring inheriting the disease.  Because a victim usually does not begin to
display symptoms until after the period in which he or she would have children
and the disease may have been misdiagnosed in earlier generations as Parkinson's
disease or other similar affliction, he or she might pass along the gene without
even knowing it.
     The gene for Huntington's disease is located on the short arm of
chromosome four in cytogenetic band 4p16.3.  It was first identified in 1993.
While everyone posseses this gene, in someone suffering from Huntington's
disease, the number of repeats of a certain trinucleotide, cytozine-adenine-
guanine (CAG), is much larger than what it is in a normal person.  In an average
person, the number of repeats is between 9 and 37.  But is a sufferer of HD, the
repeat count is from 37 to 86.  While nobody has found a direct correlation
between the number of repeats and the age when symptoms appear, there is
evidence that people with very high numbers of repeats contract the rarer early-
onset Huntington's disease, which usually affects people under the age of 20.
It is estimated that between .1 and 10 % of people who suffer from Huntington's
disease have obtained it through new mutations.
     There are three different tests for Huntington's disease.  The first,
presymptomatic testing, is for people who are at risk for the disease.  The
second, prenatal testing, is a testing of a fetus at risk for the disease.  The
third type of testing, confirmator...

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