Medical research

1st babies born in Britain using DNA from 3 people

Britain's fertility regulator on Wednesday confirmed the births of the U.K.'s first babies created using an experimental technique combining DNA from three people, an effort to prevent the children from inheriting rare genetic ...

Oncology & Cancer

Why are colorectal cancer rates rising among younger adults?

Nearly double the number of young adults under 55 are being diagnosed with colorectal cancer than a decade ago, and more are dying from the disease each year, as reported recently by the American Cancer Society.

Genetics

New gene-editing technique reverses vision loss in mice

Researchers in China have successfully restored the vision of mice with retinitis pigmentosa, one of the major causes of blindness in humans. The study, to be published March 17 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, uses ...

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A genetic disorder is an illness caused by abnormalities in genes or chromosomes, especially a condition that is present from before birth. Most genetic disorders are quite rare and affect one person in every several thousands or millions.

A genetic disorder may or may not be a heritable disorder. Some genetic disorders are passed down from the parents' genes, but others are always or almost always caused by new mutations or changes to the DNA. In other cases, the same disease, such as some forms of cancer, may be caused by an inherited genetic condition in some people, by new mutations in other people, and by non-genetic causes in still other people.

Some types of recessive gene disorders confer an advantage in certain environments when only one copy of the gene is present.

This text uses material from Wikipedia licensed under CC BY-SA