Genetic Disease

When Joselin Linder was in her 20s, her legs started to swell. She thought little of it until her health problems started to compound in ways that baffled her doctors. Diagnosed with extreme liver blockage and dangerous levels of lymph fluid, Joselin turned to the most similar case she could think of - her father's.

Over the past 200 years, human life expectancy has approximately doubled. Yet we face soaring worldwide rates of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, mental illness, heart disease, and stroke. In his fascinating new book, Dr. Lee Goldman presents a radical explanation: The key protective traits that once ensured our species' survival are now the leading global causes of illness and death.

In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times reporter and best-selling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an upstanding family in small-town South Carolina. Many of them were doctors, but still, they are struck down by an inscrutable illness. Finally they discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of providential events. Meanwhile science, progressing for 50 years along a parallel track, handed the Baxleys a question - not a cure but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease.

A coming-of-age memoir for modern times, Bleeder is the incredibly compelling tale of author Shelby Smoak. A hemophiliac, Smoak discovered he had been infected with HIV during a blood transfusion at the start of his college career. This devastating and destabilizing news led Smoak to see his world from an entirely new perspective, one in which life-threatening illness was perpetually just around the corner. Set in the 1990s along the North Carolina coast, Bleeder traces Smoak’s quest for love in a world that feels increasingly dangerous.

"Egoístas, inmortales y viajeras" explora el pasado, la realidad actual y el futuro de una enfermedad que, en términos estrictos, no es una única entidad sino más de doscientas distintas, tantas como tipos celulares construyen los diferentes órganos y tejidos de nuestro cuerpo. Discutiremos en primer lugar el origen del cáncer, una cuestión que hasta una fecha reciente no tuvo una respuesta concreta y de la que hoy podemos decir que es una enfermedad de los genes en el planeta de los genes.

Every 69 seconds, someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Of the top 10 killers, it is the only disease for which there is no cure or treatment. For most people, there is nothing that they can do to fight back. But one family is doing all they can. The DeMoe family has the most devastating form of the disease that there is: early onset Alzheimer's, an inherited genetic mutation that causes the disease in 100 percent of cases, and has a 50 percent chance of being passed onto the next generation.

Alejandra Ponce, experta en nutrigenómica, nos advierte que, contrario a lo que la medicina tradicional ha dictado, no es correcto seguir recomendaciones generales: hay que buscarun plan de alimentación adecuado para tus genes, de manera que goces hoy de una vida sana y que llegues a la vejez sin enfermedades. Aunque estamos programados genéticamente para presentar ciertos padecimientos, la combinación de una nutrición personalizada y un estilo de vida saludable hace posible retrasarlos o incluso silenciarlos para siempre.