Clinic Edition Internal Mayo Medicine Review Seventh

I am away on vacation will be back next week. Have a good week.
Jason


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Hi everyone!  It’s good to be back again at Genetics and Health.  One of my kids had to have an op and I’ve been hand holding ever since - not to mention sleeping on a hospital z bed… mmm! Still, the op was a  total success so I’m happy.

Sifting through the mountains of genetics press releases and email updates I get on a daily basis from my work in the field of medical genetics, I note that the age old question of nature or nurture is back in the news. I’ve always been fascinated by this subject … is it our genes that dictate the way we behave or is it the environment we’re brought up in?

I suspect, like a great many, that both play a role.  You only have to look at breast cancer research.  There are the BRCA genes which if you have these mutations give you an 80% chance of developing breast cancer during your life (ie very high).

Then there are the SNPs, parts of genes which if faulty can increase our risk of developing breast cancer.  If our lifestyles are not that healthy - too little exercise, too much fat, not enough fruit and veg etc. etc then we’re at far greater risk of tipping ourselves over into developing breast cancer.

An interesting article by researchers at The Virginia Commonwealth University suggests that the company we keep may be increasingly influenced by our genes.  Kenneth S Kendler MD, a professor of psychiatry and human genetics in VCU’s School of Medicine says ’As we grow and move out of our own home environment, our genetically influenced temperament becomes more and more important in influencing the kinds of friends we like to hang out with’.

I can sympathize with these findings to a certain extent but I do feel that once we’ve flown the nest life and make our way out in the big bad world, life gets daunting so we fall back on our ‘comfort zones’ which tends to be the way we were brought up by our parents. 

I class that as environment/nurture and not nature!

Source: http://www.vcu.edu

 Penny

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The South of England is reeling with the news that there has been another foot and mouth outbreak, halting the transport of all UK livestock.  The EU has also stepped in with various embargoes.  This comes only a few years after the farming community was nearly decimated from a foot and mouth outbreak in the North of England. It cost the industry nearly US$16 billion.

Since the last foot and mouth epidemic was eradicated, farmers have been ultra cautious in hygiene, cleanliness and infection control.  There is growing disquiet within the community from the test results that this strain of foot and mouth is the same as the strains used two week’s previously at both a private lab and government lab only four miles away.  By all accunts these bugs may have travelled from the aircon.

This strikes me as raising serious issues over the whole field of bio-safety.  How far can we entrust organisations both private and government to safely work with virulent strains of infectious diseases or genetically engineered organisms that could escape into the environment and cause havoc?

I would be very interested to hear your views.

Penny

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For years doctors and researchers have noticed a link between some intestinal diseases and some forms of arthritis.  This is often seen in patients with ankylosing spondylitis who the go on to develop inflammatory bowel disease.

Researchers at Landspitali University Hospital, Reykjavik, assessed the occurrence of IBD and AS among relatives and the risk of inheriting either and both disorders. Their results provide compelling evidence of a link.

For further information, click on:

http://www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/arthritis

In Norway  researchers are privileged to enjoy an extensive geneologic database collected by a company called deCode.  Norway’s population, unlike most of the rest of the world, is homogenous - that is the country’s people have hardly mixed with other global cultures so their genetic make-up has remained the same for many, many years.  That means that genetic differences are more likely to be detected.  These differences coupled with a family history database extending over 50 years means disease and outcomes can be mapped within families.

Penny

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Researchers from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, led by Dr James Sikela along with colleagues from Stanford University used DNA microarrays containing over 24,000 human genes to perform comparative genomic hybridization experiments.

They compared DNA samples from humans to those of nine other primate species - which first appeared over 60 million years ago: chimpanzee, gorilla, bonobo, orangutan, gibbon, macaque, baboon, marmoset, and lemur. This allowed them to identify specific genes and gene families that, through evolutionary time, have undergone copy number gains and losses.

The authors of the report, which appears online in Genome Research, state speculate how these changes from primate to humans may underlie human traits such as endurance running, higher cognitive function, and susceptibility to genetic disease.

In particular, the human copy number expansion of a gene called AQP7 could explain why humans have evolved the capacity for endurance running. AQP7, or aquaporin 7, plays a role in transporting water and glycerol across membranes. Therefore, it may facilitate the mobilization of glycogen (energy) stores during long periods of intense exercise; it may also play a role in dissipating excess heat through sweating.

This fascinating piece of research starts to unravel the very essence of how we evolved into humans over so many millions of years.

Penny

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