• Question: What causes heredity diseases?

    Asked by easy1tan on 14 Mar 2024.
    • Photo: Carmen Whitehead

      Carmen Whitehead answered on 14 Mar 2024:


      Hereditary mean you get it from your biological parents. They are caused by ‘faulty’ genes, that cause things to go wrong in your body. Like producing too much mucous in the lungs, like in cystic fibrosis, or not making the right hormone to deal with sugar in you blood, like in diabetes. Usually, you need two copies of the ‘faulty’ gene to have the disease, but sometimes you only need one. Also, if you have one copy and don’t have the disease, you are called a carrier, which means you can pass the ‘faulty’ gene onto your own biological children!

    • Photo: Christie Waddington

      Christie Waddington answered on 15 Mar 2024:


      These are mutations if DNA that are passed on from parents to their children. Some hereditary diseases are recessive mutations, so you need the same mutation from both parents. Some are dominant mutations, so you only need one parent to have the mutation to pass it on. Sometimes people who want children who think they might have a mutation can get tested to see if they will pass it on.
      Some genetic diseases can also happen randomly just by random mistakes and you can’t predict those.

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