Cystic Fibrosis :: essays research papers

For a child with cystic fibrosis life is mostly a series of respitory infections doctors visits and medications. cystic fibrosis causes a build up of mucus in th lungs devising breathing difficult . The thick mucus coats the h communicatelike projections lining air passage weakening the bodys immune system .Excess mucus interfers with the functioning of some other oragns too.In the liver and pancreas mucus blocks the flow of the digestive enzymes in the intestine so food is not digested properly. Worn down by the repeated bouts of ailment a cystic fibrosis affected role rarely lives beyond his or her twenties. cystic fibrosis is most common inherited disorder among Caucasian people. The disease which begins in infancy afflicts more than 25,000 Ameri merchant ships and causes more than 500 deaths every year. Forty old age ago the average life span of a cystic fibrosis patient was five years .Today improved medical therapies and nurtrient rich diets have enabled cystic fibrosis s uffers to survive into adulthood. Research into the cause of cystic fibrosis reads like a scout story. One clue is that cystic fibrosis patients have excess amounts of sodium and chloride in their sweat making it vey common salty . At the University of North Carolina researchers found that salt imbalance caues thick mucus to accumulate in the patients lungd. High train of salt in lung cells draw water out of the mucus create it to thicken.The level of salt in a cell is determained by the bowel movement of ions across the cell membrane.Ions are carried across call memebranes by protein channel embedded in the cell membrane. Since the stucture and functions of proteins are determained by cistrons problems with ion transport can be assumed to have a agenttic basis. In 1989 an American Canadian research team found thre defect in the gene called the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator gene ,produces a protein that usually helps maintain ordinary levels of chlorid e. In about 60% of cystic fibrosis pateints the protein made by the CFTR gene is missing an amino acid called phenylalanine