I asked some friends recently what they'd like to read about in this blog. One of them answered that she'd like to learn about common genetic conditions like color blindness and heterochromia. Perhaps you've been wondering about these too. Color Blindness Red/green color blindness is by far the most common type, with an incidence of 1 in 12 m...

For anyone who has read Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon, you know that his premise is that diversity is what unites us all. He explains that individuals from different families who have the same type of trait or condition are often more like each other than the families they come from, hence the title of the book. He writes, among other things,...

Eating healthy, exercising, and not smoking is good for all of us. It's probably hard to find many people who don't know that. But what most people may not realize is that our family histories can be strong influences on disease risk. Common medical issues such as heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, and cancer can run in families. While we cannot c...

The Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders…. Such as We Know Them Have you ever noticed that many things run in families? Whether it's heart disease, arthritis or red hair, it is often fairly simple to trace the lines of inheritance throughout the generations. But sometimes, clarity is hard to come by. In some families, several different hereditary diso...

It can be confusing to say that cancer is genetic but also that most of the time it is not hereditary. It is genetic in the sense that it involves our genes, but most of the time there are gene changes that occur long after we are born, that were not passed down to us by our parents. This also means that we will generally not pass them on to our ch...

Throughout the last 50 years or so, many prenatal testing options have become available, the two most common being amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling (CVS).These allow for a woman or a couple to determine certain health issues of an unborn baby. Prenatal testing will never guarantee a healthy child, as many genetic disorders and birth defe...

That's me on the right. On the left, is my sister Donna.  And incidentally, we never dress alike, but when in Ann Arbor … Go Blue! "Oh my God - you guys are identical!" But really, the fact that we look alike doesn't mean we are identical.   Everyone's first question upon finding out my sister and I are twins is, "Are you identical or fra...

In Genetic MythBusters Part 1, I discussed the idea of genetic conditions skipping a generation. If you read it, you know that nothing actually does skip a generation. Another common myth is that there is a really high risk for birth defects when people who are related to each other have children together. In actuality, the risk is increased, but n...

In this post I thought I would start talking about some general genetics myths that I find many people share. First, the idea of diseases or disorders skipping a generation. From a genetic standpoint, there really is no such thing as skipping a generation. This is because you cannot pass on what you don't have. So if your father has, for example, a...