Thursday, 28 November 2013

Dementia And Genetics

By Jack Morgan


It is important to know if dementia is a hereditary disease or not. There are many experts who believe that this disease is a hereditary condition. It means that this disease can be passed through families. You should read this article when you want to know about this disease. There are two main types of dementia. They are early onset and late onset dementia problem.

People who have dementia may have not inherited it. Even though one can inherit this disease, not all are transferred from family to family. There exist other causes of dementia hence there is no need to worry a lot.

In addition to these causes, genes also play a major role in developing dementia. However, the effects of genes do vary considerably. Gene transmission is commonly based on the different variations of the condition occurring from attack by different diseases. Some forms of dementia such as fronto-temporal and those resulting from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease have a higher risk of transmitting dementia from parent to child through genes.

There are about 400 families that have dementia caused by PSEN-1 gene mutation on chromosome 14. This is another rare dementia problem that is caused by hereditary or genetic problems. This condition can happen in about half of early onset dementia disease in the world. There are many people who suffer from this condition.

In most cases, dementia signals as a signal to Alzheimer's disease. Most Alzheimer's sufferers experience vascular dementia which is one of the forms of dementia associated with occurrence of strokes. There are four genes that have been identified and connected with the development of the disease. Three of them affect younger people while one affects older people. People with these genes resulting from family members with an early onset are highly susceptible to developing the condition in their late ages. However, these genes are rare and are transmitted from the parent to their children on a 50 percent basis. This means probably half of the children in a family could have the condition.

There is also a situation where dementia disease can either show itself in form of inherited or non-inherited. For the case of fronto-temporal type of dementia, up to 50 per cent would have been inherited. Alzheimer's disease on the other hand is not inherited in this case.

Other rare dementias that are hereditary include fatal familial insomnia, familial Danish dementia and familial British dementia among others. Each of them has different symptoms but hallucinations, paralysis and poor reflexes are common.

Most of the research done have focussed on Inherited dementias and this has given a step forward that will soon be considered to be a breakthrough. The research has been to find out what other factors causes dementia disease. It is also best for the family of those who have been affected to voluntarily accept to be studied by physicians. These will not only help the family understand the disease but it will give them morale. Accepting research to be done is also advantageous to future generation and there is probability of your children and family being part of that generation.

Different people may have different dementia problems. Dementia can be hereditary in some people with mutated genes. If you have some relatives who have dementia, you should be careful with these diseases. They may increase the chance of getting this disease.




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