Unit 9 Project SC235 General Biology Kaplan University Jaclyn Gosciak May 21, 2013

In my family, there is a risk of diabetes and cancer. As for what types of cancer the only one I am positive about is colon cancer. I do not know very much about my father or his family. My grandfather and my aunt both have diabetes this is on my mother’s side so I feel this makes me at risk for diabetes. According to the American Diabetes Association, diabetes affected as many as 23.6 million adults and children in the United States as of 2007. Diabetes conditions develop when the body becomes unable to metabolize available glucose, or sugar materials. Because glucose acts as the primary fuel for cells, this inability can cause serious medical conditions to develop when left untreated. Diabetes can be inherited from a parent through a genetic trait; however, its actual development may rely on the presence of certain environmental conditions. Type one diabetes genes alone is not enough to give someone the disease. Unlike some traits, diabetes does not seem to be inherited in a simple pattern. Yet two factors are important. You inherit a predisposition to the disease then something in your environment triggers it. In most cases of type one the person needs to inherit risk factors form both parents. They also believe white people have more risk factors than any other culture because whites have the highest rate of type 1 diabetes. So who are at risk? If an immediate relative (parent, brother, sister, son or daughter) has type 1 diabetes, one's risk of developing type 1 diabetes is 10 to 20 times the risk of the general population, or If one child in a family has type 1 diabetes, their siblings have about a 1 in 10 risk of developing it by age 50. Being that most of the people who are at risk do not end up getting diabetes, researchers want to