Genetic Report

Cicily Bennion

526 Words

Inspiration: Three genes from my genetic report

gs141
2x risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. You carry one APOE-ε3 allele and one APOE-ε4 allele. This results in 2x-3x increased relative risk of Alzheimer's disease compared to those carrying two APOE-ε3 alleles.

My grandmother’s mind rotted first while she lived, plaques and tangles in the folds of her brain destroying her from the inside out. We didn’t know the extent of it until my grandfather passed away, and suddenly she was living alone in her little yellow house just a few blocks away from ours. We thought things were mostly fine until one night the neighbors called to tell my father that they’d found his mother wandering the street at night barefoot, cold, and looking for children who were not children anymore. He went over to put her back to bed, but she only clamored through the house, yelling over the imagined din of galloping horses in the basement: they won’t leave (never leave) her. 


rs4420638(A;G)
~3x increased Alzheimer's risk. Apolipoprotein E ApoE status is technically defined by two different SNPs, rs429358 and rs7412. This SNP, rs4420638, is situated about 14kb away in the adjacent ApoC1 gene and is co-inherited with ApoE and thus associated with late-onset Alzheimer's disease.

I don’t recall the decision to put her in a home, only visiting her there. I was seven, then eight, then nine, then ten years old. I grew up, and she deteriorated, shrunk within herself. She became so small that when we shopped for her, we shopped in the children’s section. During our visits it seemed that she only asked about people who were dead. “Where’s Dad?” she’d ask. 

My mother kept a candy dish in the room stocked with hard candies, and I spent our visits hunched over that bowl, eating colored morsel after colored morsel. As the disease progressed, my grandmother stopped speaking altogether. She clenched her fists and stirred the air. When I hugged her goodbye, she would not let go. 

When someone says a person has died of Alzheimer’s, do you know what they mean? They mean that the disease progressed to the point that the patient had forgotten how to swallow. It’s as if the brain is so tired of misfiring neurons that it will no longer abide itself.


rs17646665(G;G)
Reduced risk for Alzheimer's (~0.33x?). Minor Allele (G) associated with reduced risk (OR 0.6x, CI: 0.4-0.8) for Alzheimer's Disease; it is possible that the reported association could be restricted to a Swedish/Scandinavian population.

I have only one memory of my grandmother when she was lucid. She, my mother, and I sat at her kitchen table together. What were we doing? I wish I knew. It seems that we were baking, but who can say? I seem to recall that my grandma was working with her hands, which must have been why I noticed them––knuckles and veins wrapped in spotted, delicate skin. I asked, “Is that what happens to hands when they get old?” My mother flushed, embarrassed by my question, but Grandma only laughed and took my perfect, youthful hands in hers to examine them. “Well, yes,” she said. “Yes, I guess that is what happens.”


Comments

  1. Jordan FloydAugust 26, 2020 at 2:24 PM

    The shift in the second section, in which the persona directly addresses the reader, is really gripping. There's a real urgency there that the persona is able to express via the question.

    ReplyDelete

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