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Progeria Essay

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Progeria

Progeria is one of the least known genetic disorders. There are two types of Progeria, the only difference being the age group that it affects. The Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome is commonly called Childhood Progeria. The second type of Progeria is Werner’s Syndrome, which is the adult form of Progeria. What basically happens in this disorder is that age is accelerated seven times faster than that of a normal person. For example, for Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome, a child could look like he is fifty when he is actually five years old. A twenty year old with Werner’s Syndrome could look similar to a sixty or seventy year old person. There is, even now, not much information known about this genetic disorder because …show more content…

They usually have cloudy corneas and possibly blue sclera, which is when the white portion of the eyeball is blue. Most children infected with this disorder are bald by the time they are four years old and usually don’t grow any taller than three feet. They also typically weigh between 30 to 35 pounds. Not only does the appearance age, but also the organs experience the accelerated rate of aging. The spleen is usually enlarged. A child with Progeria will never reach puberty. Children with Progeria usually don’t die by “old age.” Instead, they usually die at the average age of 13 from a cardiovascular disease, arteriosclerosis of some other disease that usually affects the very old.

Once called the “leprechaun’s disease”, Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome was first described in 1886 by the English surgeon Jonathan Hutchinson and by Hastings Gilford in 1904. The main reason why it took so long to find the gene for Childhood Progeria is that it only affects about one baby in every four million to eight million in the world.
This is about equivalent to one baby with the disorder being born each year in the United States. Since this disorder was discovered over a century ago, only a little over a hundred cases have been reported, but they were hard to study from because of the lack of technology. The Progeria Research Foundation is the single organization that

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