Inherited Disease Quotes

My sister learned she was a carrier for a recessive disease, Bloom syndrome, late in one of her pregnancies. I remember the panicked call and the weeks of worry as she and her husband awaited his test results; if he was also a carrier, this meant their daughter had a one in four chance of being born with the disorder.

Cancer runs in our family. I lost my grandmother to it. There's a saying that you meet people and instantly know them. My grandmother and I had that. The first time my heart was broken was when my grandmother passed away. I was twenty-one.

It was a double jolt for me. The jolt of seeing my father slowly die, the jolt of knowing that I was diabetic and could meet the same fate if I didn't take care of myself.

My dad had an aunt at the turn of the century who died from diabetes, but she was the closest affected relative in my family.

Some maladies are rich and precious and only to be acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold.

People are used to dealing with risk. You are told if you smoke, you are at higher risk of lung cancer. And I think people are able to also understand, when they are told they are a carrier for a genetic disease, that is not a risk to them personally but something that they could pass on to children.

One of the common conditions on both sides of my families is diabetes.

I don't suffer from SCD myself, but I do carry the gene. This means that if I married another person who carried the gene, there would be a danger our children would suffer from the disease.

Muscular dystrophy ... was never seen until Duchenne described it in the 1850s. By 1860, after his original description, many hundreds of cases had been recognised and described, so much so that Charcot said: 'How is it that a disease so common, so widespread, and so recognisable at a glance - a disease which has doubtless always existed - how is it that it is recognised only now? Why did we need M. Duchenne to open our eyes?'

When my parents died, they both were 47, and they died of complications of different diseases, one being diabetes. I became a diabetic at 17 and went on this road of kind of self-destruction, eating-wise, until I was 40.

I mean, I inherited the disease of alcoholism, and I learned early to get help when I needed it.

Prostate cancer has taken a lot from me. First it took my grandfather and then my dad.

I have never had feeling in my toes. My uncle, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, once told me in confidence he had the same syndrome, leading me to believe it is genetic.

I have a lot of breast cancer history on my mother's side of the family.

Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.

Every single cancer is a genetic disease. Not necessarily inherited from your parents, but it's genetic changes which cause cancer. So as we sequence the genomes of tumours and compare those to the sequence of patients, we're getting down to the fundamental basis of each individual person's cancer.

My dad passed on asthma to me. It's kind of ironic because he outgrew it at 13.

In 'The Blood Doctor,' I wrote about the history of haemophilia and the devastating effects of the disease at a time when there was no remedy.

An individual doesn't get cancer, a family does.

My uncle is a hemophiliac, and my brother is one as well. I am a carrier, and it's a disease that my kids also deal with. It's something that has affected my family and I for so long, and I think it's actually what drove me to comedy as a means to cope during tough times.

My father passed from cancer in 2000; his brother died of cancer before that. My grandfather died of cancer.

Some forms of motor neuron disease are genetically linked, but I have no indication that my kind is. No other member of my family has had it. But I would be in favour of abortion if there was a high risk.

I am the third generation of women in my family to be struck with a gynecologic cancer. Because of this legacy, we have been genetically tested.

I can't think of anything that's hit me harder in my life than when I learned that three of our youngest grandchildren were diagnosed with Niemann-Pick C.