A genetic disorder is an illness caused by abnormalities in genes or chromosomes, especially a condition that is present from before birth. Most genetic disorders are quite rare and affect one person in every several thousands or millions.
A genetic disorder may or may not be a heritable disorder. Some genetic disorders are passed down from the parents' genes, but others are always or almost always caused by new mutations or changes to the DNA. In other cases, the same disease, such as some forms of cancer, may be caused by an inherited genetic condition in some people, by new mutations in other people, and by nongenetic causes in still other people.
Some types of recessive gene disorders confer an advantage in certain environments when only one copy of the gene is present.
Read more about Genetic Disorder: Single Gene Disorder, Multifactorial and Polygenic (complex) Disorders, Prognosis and Treatment of Genetic Disorders
Famous quotes containing the words genetic and/or disorder:
“Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“In a town-meeting, the great secret of political science was uncovered, and the problem solved, how to give every individual his fair weight in the government, without any disorder from numbers. In a town-meeting, the roots of society were reached. Here the rich gave counsel, but the poor also; and moreover, the just and the unjust.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)