Causes of premature aging

Causes of premature aging

Premature aging The aging stage is an inevitable stage that every person must go through after he gets old, and fine lines appear, wrinkles and lines around the mouth, but there is a disease that affects children, which causes them to age at a very early age, known as Progeria or Hugginson Guilford Syndrome, What is this disease, and what is the reason for its occurrence?

Progeria

Progeria is a Greek word that is divided into two parts, (bro) which means premature, and (giriya) which means old age, causes premature aging, so that those with it live at an average of only fifteen years, and the manifestations of this disease resemble those of normal aging. The stages developed very rapidly, so that the average age of children increased from five to ten times, compared to the normal situation.

The cause of progeria

It cannot be said that progeria is a genetic disease; Because it is not transmitted from parents to the patient, but rather it results from a genetic defect, so a genetic mutation occurs in the fetus during the months of pregnancy. The gene responsible for this disease remained unknown for a long period of time, due to many difficulties, including the number of infected people being small and distributed over long distances, which made it difficult to conduct studies, but scientists were able to find out the reason in 2003, after they studied the genetic system of twenty patients and their families, And there was a similarity between 18 patients carrying the same change, located in the lamina gene (LMNA), which is located on the first chromosome, and the cause of the defect was the replacement of one nitrogen base, which led to the change of the amino acid guanine to the amino acid adenine, which caused the emergence of the disease, changing the amino gene It leads to the failure of it to do its job, which is to produce the lamina protein responsible for supporting and supporting the anatomy of the nucleus in the cell. Infection with this disease is very rare, and it may occur once in every eight million births, and the inheritance of this disease is very rare. Because a person with progeria does not live long enough to be able to conceive

Symptoms

In the first months of the patient’s life it appears normal, until he reaches the eighth month, the symptoms of aging begin to appear rapidly, the skin wrinkles and the appearance of old skin becomes, the patient develops osteoporosis, and the patient’s hair falls out and becomes bald at the age of four, and the child's height does not increase more than One meter, the internal organs are aging, and the weight of a child with progeria does not exceed 16 kilograms, even if he reaches the age of adolescence, and the patient may complain of diseases that affect the elderly, such as atherosclerosis, in addition to cardiovascular diseases, and the size of the head appears large, Compared to the head and lower jaw, the appearance of affected children is similar despite the different families and races.