Hey, everyone, this is David. Julie’s going to phone this one in because once she started looking at the symptoms she couldn’t really take it anymore and had to stop. I remember a little bit about Huntington’s and biology/genetics so I might be able to explain it in a bit more detail, but I’ll try and break it down simply like Julie has been doing so far.
The most recognizable symptoms of Huntington’s are chorea, which is the general term for jerky, uncontrolled, and random movements, and then a lack of coordination. Basically, Huntington’s messes up a protein, which results in neuronal cell death (cell death in some areas of the brain), which causes these effects. However, Huntington’s also affects mental abilities and some aspects of behavior because of the abnormal protein. These re the most noticeable effects, but sometimes the psychological changes happen beforehand and are overlooked. However, the main thing with Huntington’s is that symptoms vary from person to person, depending on the severity of how the protein is altered. Whereas some people show chorea as above, some go the opposite route and display stiffness and slow movement instead of random and quick movement. This alternative is called dystonia.
People who are affected with Huntington’s generally display a lack of coordination and an unsteady gait, which gets progressively worse as the disease does. It eventually gets so bad that they lose control over their facial expressions, they can no longer perform daily tasks such as standing or sitting, and some even lose the ability to swallow, eat, and talk. It’s pretty terrible, but that’s in the later stages of the disease. Other symptoms that appear earlier, the cognitive symptoms, include degradation of cognitive ability, which leads to the loss of abstract thinking and inhibition of inappropriate action, the loss of psychomotor function, which leads to the physical symptoms described above, one’s perception of self and surroundings tends to be slightly distorted, the loss of short-term memory function, and the ability to learn new skills is effectively destroyed.
Wow. What a trip. I can’t even begin to think of that sort of thing happening to Julie. There are a few more symptoms, the psychopathological, but they vary widely from person to person. I can’t even think of those sorts of things happening to Julie – I mean, loss of emotion? Aggressive behavior? Anxiety or depression? Egocentricism? That just seems so contrary to what I’ve seen out of Julie that I don’t think that it could happen. But then again, I guess anything could happen with such a crazy genetic disease.
I guess that, now that we know pretty much all that we can about Huntington’s, now it’s time to make a decision. The potential implications are pretty big though so we’re going to have to chew over a lot of stuff. Don’t expect the next Huntington’s post to come any time soon…
