Question: Are genetic illnesses or diseases in your body since you’re born or do they build-up further in your life?

Helena Fisk answered on 11 Jun 2020:

Hi Javier,

I think I answered a similar question by you yesterday involving how lifestyle affects genetic diseases if you are able to go back and have a look at that?

I described how some genetic conditions are ones that you are born with, such as Down’s Syndrome, and occur by chance (not inherited from our parents DNA), but others you can inherit from your parents that you may be born with or may develop in later life.
Our lifestyle can also effect the expression of our genes so some diseases that are not inherited but still involve changes to the expression of our genes can develop in later life due to our choices such as poor diet, lack of exercise, smoking or consuming a lot of alcohol. Sometimes it is a combination of both; we can inherit a greater risk of developing a particular illness from our parents, but our lifestyle choices may impact how early this develops, or how severely we suffer with the illness.

I used diabetes as an example as you can inherit a risk of developing this but particularly with type-2 diabetes, our lifestyle choices greatly impact if and when this may develop and how severe the condition may be. Some people are able to control their diabetes with diet and exercise, whereas others require medication. Type-1 diabetes is slightly different as our body attacks the cells making insulin which we call an autoimmune disease so diabetes can then develop very quickly in children and teenagers.

Other diseases that our genes play a role in will not show until much later in life such as Alzheimer’s disease which is the most common form of dementia seen in elderly people. We can inherit variants of genes that may increase our risk of developing this. Scientists have found over 20 genes that are related to Alzheimer’s risk but not all the of these will be effected in every individual with Alzheimer’s.

Hope that answers your question 🙂