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Huntington’s disease is a fatal disorder that affects both physical and mental abilities and generally attacks right in the mid years — symptoms begin to appear between the ages of 30 and 50 and worsen over the next 10 to 25 years. It’s a genetic disease; if one parent has Huntington’s disease, each child has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the bad gene.

Huntington’s disease takes the worst features of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS and brings them together into one disease. It causes depression and changes in personality, and it hampers the ability to walk and causes involuntary movements. Other symptoms include slurred speech and difficulty in swallowing.

The disease is incurable, and most who are diagnosed live 10 to 20 years after diagnosis, although some have lived 30 to 40 years.

Chronic inflammation has often been found in the nerve cells of those with Huntington’s disease, and researchers believe it may be one cause of the disease’s damage to the nervous system.

In fact, some studies have found that chronic inflammation plays a key role in how Huntington’s disease progresses. Inflammation occurs when there is injury or infection as the body’s way of protecting itself against infection. Your immune system attacks foreign systems in your body to get rid of them.

Some scientists believe the immune system sees an extended glutamine tract and interprets it as a foreign substance and tries to get rid of it.