Huntington's Disease(HD) is a genetic disorder and affects the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia is a part of you brain. It controls your movement coordination, your ability to process thoughts and your voluntary movement.
Here's the Basil Ganglia:
What HD does is it results in the cell loss of cells in the brain, specifically the basal ganglia. It results in loss of proper function of voluntary and involuntary movements and loss of psychological function. HD often results in dementia.
Symptoms:
This is a serious disorder. It is absolutely detrimental and my heart really goes out to those affected with Huntington's disease.
Here we go:
Chorea*
Inability to control you range of movement. eg. you want to pat someone on the back, you intend to move your hand and lightly pat someone on the back. If you have HD you may unintentional end up smacking someone hard on the head.
Muscle stiffness, affects your ability to move and balance your body
Slow process of information
Memory degeneration
Hard time multi-tasking
Difficulty controlling emotions
Depression
Anxiety
Agression
Hallucinations
*Chorea is the quick and uncontrollable movement of your limbs.
Other Symptoms:
Treatment:
There is no cure. Whats even worse is there isn't even medication that can slow down the process of HD. However, there is lots of medication to manage the symptoms of HD.
Examples are:
Anti-depressants
Speech therapy
Physical therapy
Anti-psychotic drugs
I'm not going to go into causes, you would need background knowledge of genetics. I don't have that background knowledge. Also, not much is known to why HD causes brain cells to deteriorate.
I never knew HD had so many symptoms. Feel free to research more about HD and ask any questions in the comments.
I think a really tough part of this disease as well is the genetic factor. I think I read once that the children of people with Huntington's have a 50% chance of inheriting the gene. I think that would be hard on both the parent and child. As a child of a parent with Huntington's, there is predictive testing for the gene, but would you want to know if your future will be undeniably plagued with such a terrible disease? That would be a hard decision.
ReplyDeleteGenetic diseases are the worst. I feel awful for the people who have to deal with this. What the hell, nature. And I agree with Michelle. I guess you could have a karyotype done (I think that's what it's called), but those are probably super expensive so not many people would have that luxury.
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