Huntington disease
Video information
Content Reviewer
Last updated
08-05-2019
Citation
Osmosis: Huntington disease. (2019, August 18). Retrieved from (https://www.osmosis.org/learn/Huntington_disease).
New
Contents
Summary
Memory Anchors
Document search
References
Summary of Huntington disease
Huntington's disease
Huntington's disease is a neurodegenerative genetic disorder that affects muscle coordination and leads to mental decline and behavioral symptoms. Symptoms vary between individuals and affected members of the same family, but usually progress predictably. The earliest symptoms are often subtle problems with mood or cognition. A general lack of coordination and an unsteady gait often follow. As the disease advances, uncoordinated, jerky body movements become more apparent, along with a decline in mental abilities and behavioral symptoms. Physical abilities gradually worsen until coordinated movement becomes difficult. Mental abilities generally decline into dementia.
References and External Links
Huntington's disease
Huntington disease exam links
Transcript for Huntington disease
Content Reviewers:
Rishi Desai, MD, MPHHuntington disease
Huntington disease, or HD, is a rare neurodegenerative disease that involves a repeated sequence of DNA that causes an abnormal protein to form, leading to abnormal movements and cognitive problems.
Huntington disease is an autosomal dominant genetic disorder, which means that one affected copy of a gene is enough to cause disease.
Affected people are typically present in each generation, because an affected person (male or female) has a 50% chance of passing on the affected gene to a child, which causes that child to have the disease.
In most people, a gene called huntingtin or HTT on chromosome 4, contains a triplet repeat, where the nucleotides C, A, and G are repeated 10-35 times in a row.
In people with Huntington disease, this repeat goes on for 36 or more times in a row.
CAG codes for the amino acid glutamine, so people with Huntington disease patients will have 36 or more glutamines in a row in the huntingtin protein.
So, in addition to being a triplet repeat disorder, HD is, more specifically, a “polyglutamine” disease.
The specific way in which extra glutamines causes HD symptoms isn’t fully worked out, but some clues are that the mutated protein aggregates within the neuronal cells of the caudate and putamen of the basal ganglia causing neuronal cell death.
Cell death might be related to excitotoxicity – which is excessive signaling of these neurons, which leads to high intracellular calcium.
The expanded CAG repeats not only affect the huntingtin protein – they affect DNA replication itself.
When copying the HTT gene, DNA polymerase can basically lose track of which CAG it’s on and accidently add extra CAGs.
Since as a zygote develops into a fetus and eventually into a full adult, by the time sperm and eggs are created, several dozen cell divisions, each with a round of DNA replication have taken place, and so there have already been ample opportunities for repeat expansion, and the more repeats that’re added, the more unstable it gets.
This expansion of the originally inherited gene means a child of a parent with HD can inherit even more CAG repeats than the parent did.
The higher the number of repeats in the protein, the earlier the age when a person starts having symptoms.
This phenomenon is called anticipation, which means that Huntington disease families often show earlier symptom onset with each generation.
Even repeats of 27-35 CAGs can expand occasionally; these are called “pre-mutation” alleles, since they don’t cause the disease, but they’re set-up for developing a mutation of 36 or more CAGs.
This process of adding more repeats is called repeat expansion and it happens way more in the production of sperm than of eggs, so both anticipation and new disease alleles generally happens when the father is the affected parent.