Mitochondrial disease

[lizardphunk]

I'm making a student presentation on mitoochondrial disease (15 minute lecture).

As I'm sitting here reading my articles, it seems to me that a lot of the dieases are "more prevalent in Northern Europe" (be it nuclear or mitochondrial mutations affecting mitochondrial function).

Coincidentally, I am in Norway, so maybe that's why this popped out. I

Comments

[nightshade1972]

My MIL is nearly 85 (this Aug). My FIL is actually her second husband. She married him when she was 33. She had my husband (her only child) when she was 42. My MIL was born in Ireland and raised in England. She's the oldest of four sisters, and they all moved to Amarillo, TX after The Blitz. One of my husband's aunts had some sort of tumor behind her left ear, which they had to operate on multiple times when she was a child (this would have been in the '30s-'40s). There's a history of hereditary hearing loss on both side's of my husband's family, in his aunt's case it came on much earlier, and is much worse than her sisters', because of all the surgeries she had when she was young.

I'm curious about the "more prevalent in England/Ireland" thing because, although I was born in the US, as was my immediate family, my maternal ancestry traces back to the Cornwall/St Austell area of England. Although none of my relatives have hydrocephalus, many of my mother's relatives, including herself, my uncle and my brother, have a "congenital malformation of the cervical spine". This is of particular interest to me because in addition to the hydrocephalus I also have a Chiari I malformation. My maternal relatives also have a long history of migraine and sinus issues. They keep treating me as though I'm the "medical freak" of the family, but I can't help thinking it's all interrelated somehow.

You're correct that more children are being correctly diagnosed with, and treated for, hydrocephalus nowadays. I don't know if it's that the incidence is genuinely higher, or if it just seems that way because more of us are surviving with, instead of dying from, the disease. The "First Generation" of hydrocephalics to survive into adulthood with a reasonable quality of life is generally considered to be those of us born between 1962-72. I'm on the tail end--I was born at the beginning of '72, I just turned 41 in January. I had my first shunt put in when I was three weeks old. I had my last two shunt revisions, a week apart, in the summer of '04. I'm also epileptic, I cannot drive, and I've been on disability since the summer of '08.

:-)