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Hemophilia - History, Future, Cause and Potential Cure.
How Does Someone Get Hemophilia?
Hemophilia is a sex-linked hereditary bleeding disorder transmitted on a gene of the X chromosome. You can not catch hemophilia as you catch a cold. It is something that some people are just born with.
There is also a very rare condition known as acquired hemophilia. This is a spontaneous formation of an antibody against Factor 8. This autoimmune situation renders a person a hemophiliac with only slight differences from "congenital" hemophiliacs.
Among the genes and chromosomes (hereditary messengers) we inherit from our parents are two sex chromosomes, labeled X and Y. A woman inherits two X chromosomes, one from her mother and one from her father. This makes her female.
A man inherits one X chromosome from his mother and a Y chromosome from his father, instead of a second X. This makes him male. If all of a person's X chromosomes have the hemophilia gene, then that person will have hemophilia. The condition is much less common in women than in men.
In some cases hemophilia is "hidden" for many generations if no affected male children are born. The gene for hemophilia in such cases is carried through several generations of females who, because they have a second X chromosome that is normal, do not suffer from the disease themselves.
Other cases may have no family history, meaning that the change in the X chromosome is a new one. This would be a mutation of the gene. Most mothers of children with hemophilia, however, have fathers, grandfathers, brothers or other male relatives on the maternal side of their families who were born with hemophilia. Very rarely, a female with hemophilia is born if her mother is a carrier and her father has hemophilia.
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