Friday, July 2, 2010

MS and Genetics

We're up north at the cottage again for an extended Canada Day weekend.  Yesterday we were invited to the home of a wonderful lady who is one of five cousins in her family with MS.  There were other MSers there, including a fellow who is from a different family that also has five cousins that have MS.  Other than the fact that they are both of Acadian heritage, there is nothing that directly links those two afflicted families.  I realize that I may be "misremembering", but I was sure that when I was reading up on MS soon after I was diagnosed, I had learned that genetics was understood to play only a small part in the incidence of MS.  However, with two families having such a high number of MSers, it makes me wonder if there isn't something wrong in the way that the statistics for genetic causality were calculated.

1 comment:

  1. One of the early video presentations on CCSVI in MS on the MS Society of Canada website includes some data on genetic influences in MS. I think it said that where one of a twin has MS, about 34% of the time, the other one does too.

    I think they even isolated the genes which seemed to be linked to many people with the disease. Maybe one of the ways in which veins become more susceptible to stenosis?

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