South Florida Jews help unearth clues to genetic diseases
http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6465
Redacted from an article By Nicole Brochu, Staff Writer
Florida Sun Sentinel
South Florida has one of the world’s largest populations of
Ashkenazis — Jews of Central and Eastern European descent — making it
home to some potentially groundbreaking medical research. In Boca Raton,
the Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders Center is in the midst
of a project, funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, to study local
Ashkenazi Jews in the hopes of better understanding what causes
Parkinson’s, and how to prevent it. At the University of South Florida,
a study involving Ashkenazi women from the Miami area explored cultural
and religious influences on colorectal cancer.
Other recent studies have tapped Ashkenazis to learn more about the
causes and potential treatments for breast cancer, pancreatic cancer,
Crohn’s disease, autism and a host of other ailments. After decades of
scientific study, researchers know more about Ashkenazi Jews’ genetic
history than many other ethnic groups, and what they’ve discovered may
appear disturbing: More than 20 genetic diseases are more common to
these descendants of Central and Eastern Europeans, and many are
carriers for at least one illness.
But there’s power in that knowledge.
“It’s extremely important” to be able to study a group of people with
known ties to particular disorders, said Dr. Stefan Glück, a breast
oncologist at the University of Miami Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer
Center. “You can transpose the data studied in Ashkenazi Jews onto other
patients.”
As just one example, Montreal researchers found they could
successfully treat breast cancer with DNA-damaging agents by studying
Ashkenazi patients then broadening the research to a wider population,
Glück said.”That continues to be a very important study in the treatment
of breast cancer,” he said. It is the kind of research undertaken since
the 1960s and 1970s, when studies on Tay-Sachs, a deadly disease of the
nervous system passed down through families, found that the disorder
had an inordinately high incidence among a group known as Ashkenazi
Jews.
Estimated by some historians to account for about 80 percent
of the world’s Jews today, Ashkenazis trace their ancestry to the
Israelite tribes of Canaan in the Middle East, whose descendants later
settled in the 11th through 19th centuries in Central and Eastern
Europe, in countries now known as Poland, Russia, Germany, Lithuania,
Ukraine and the like.
In the years since those first Tay-Sachs studies, scores of research
projects — many of them led by Jewish doctors and scientists with a
natural interest in diseases afflicting their relatives — have uncovered
data linking dozens of inherited diseases to gene mutations that are
more common to Ashkenazis than the general population, experts say.
“We have our genetic and medical history written into our cells,”
said Bennett Greenspan, president of Family Tree DNA, a Houston,
Texas-based genetic testing service. “Science and technology are only
now beginning to write the book.”
Ashkenazis’ genetic inscriptions, it turns out, are a function of
their early ancestors’ close-knit interfamilial ties and habits, experts
agree. A culturally isolated group, they married among themselves “in a
damn-near exclusive way,” becoming so-called “founders” of genetic
traits passed on through the ages, Greenspan said.
All of us carry some recessive genetic mutations in our cells, but
like Bahamians, some Africans and other isolated groups, Ashkenazis’
early marital and childbearing patterns made their mutations more
prevalent among later generations, said Dr. Deborah Barbouth, director
of the Victor Center for the Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases at
Miami Children’s Hospital.
But don’t let the laundry list of disorders fool you. It’s
not that this population of Jews is more sickly than anyone else,
Barbouth said. Decades of study have just revealed more about their
genetics.
Potential marital candidates should really be screened for the following diseases.
(By the way Orthodox Jews have been doing this testing, in a very
private mutual manner, for years, and well before the final commitment
is made.) jsk
Jewish Genetic Diseases:
• Bloom syndrome • Canavan Disease • Cystic fibrosis • Dihydrolipoamide
• Dehydrogenase Deficiency (DLD Deficiency) • Familial Dysautonomia
• Familial Hyperinsullnism • Fanconi Anemia Type C
• Gaucher’s disease • Glycogen Storage Disease, Type la ;
• Joubert Syndrome • Maple syrup urine disease • Mucolipldosis IV (ML4)
• Nemaline Myopathy • Niemann-Pick Disease Type A • Spinal Muscular Atrophy
• Tay-Sachs Disease • Usher Syndrome Type IF • Usher Syndrome Type 3
• Walker-Warburg syndrome.
Other diseases prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews include Parktnson’s Torsion Dystonia, breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
(Of course, we don’t want to include familial neurosis. No one would ever get married!) jsk
Sources: Victor Center for the Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases plus multiple online sources
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