Introduction How do you define Kennedy’s disease? Kennedy’s disease is a rare inherited disease that disturbs the males in the family by progressively weakening and wasting the motor neurons in the muscles (Kennedy's Disease Association, 2015). Kennedy’s disease got its name from the studies by Dr. William R. Kennedy who found patients with the rare disorder back in 1968, which had occurred in the later part of the adult life. Kennedy’s disease starts to appear in males between the ages of 30 to 50 years old. Kennedy’s disease has many other designations that are used for this disorder, but the most common are X-linked Spinal and Bulbar Muscular Atrophy, X-linked Spinal Bulbar Muscular Atrophy, or SBMA (Kennedy's Disease Association, 2015). SBMA is a rare disorder because it affects one in 150,000 individuals
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Humans have two sex chromosomes the dictate the gender of the baby with the mother providing the ‘X’ and the father contributing either the ‘X’ or the ‘Y’ chromosome, which will lead to either the ‘XX’ or the ‘XY’ DNA strain to determine the sex of the child (Better Health Channel, 2015). The normal DNA supersedes the mutated DNA, but the females are carriers, while each boy having a 50% chance of inheriting, which makes it a recessive disorder with the symptoms not emerging in the females. Current technology has helped our medical facilities to test for the disorder by using blood samples, which can be accurate for determining if someone is going to be a carrier or will show the signs of the disorder later on in their life. Previously, the testing of the inherited disorder was with the symptoms, which lead to misdiagnosing of the disease to a similar diseased called motor neurone disease (MND). There are fours types of MND, but people with Kennedy’s disease have been mostly misdiagnosed with ALS because the symptoms are
Humans have two sex chromosomes the dictate the gender of the baby with the mother providing the ‘X’ and the father contributing either the ‘X’ or the ‘Y’ chromosome, which will lead to either the ‘XX’ or the ‘XY’ DNA strain to determine the sex of the child (Better Health Channel, 2015). The normal DNA supersedes the mutated DNA, but the females are carriers, while each boy having a 50% chance of inheriting, which makes it a recessive disorder with the symptoms not emerging in the females. Current technology has helped our medical facilities to test for the disorder by using blood samples, which can be accurate for determining if someone is going to be a carrier or will show the signs of the disorder later on in their life. Previously, the testing of the inherited disorder was with the symptoms, which lead to misdiagnosing of the disease to a similar diseased called motor neurone disease (MND). There are fours types of MND, but people with Kennedy’s disease have been mostly misdiagnosed with ALS because the symptoms are