Cystic+Fibrosis-Rosa+P.

Cystic Fibrosis

**Description: ** Cystic Fibrosis is a disease that affects the lungs and digestive system. It causes the body to produce unusually thick sticky mucus that clogs your lungs and leads to life-threating lung infections. Cystic Fibrosis also obstructs the pancreas stopping natural enzymes from helping the body break down and absorb food and protein.

**Inheritance: ** The disease is passed through genes from parents to children. If you have Cystic Fibrosis, you inherited two faulty Cystic Fibrosis genes, one from each parent. It’s most likely the the parents of a child with Cystic Fibrosis, don’t have the disease themselves.

**Symptoms: ** The symptoms of Cystic Fibrosis are, very salty-tasting skin, persistent coughing (at times with phlegm), frequent lung infections, wheezing or shortness of breath, poor growth/ weight gain (in spite of a good diet), and frequent greasy, bulky stools or difficulty in bowel movements.

**Daily Life: ** media type="custom" key="9499270"

**Diagnosis: ** The disease is diagnosed based on different test. For newborns, they test for Cystic Fibrosis using a blood test. If the blood test states that you have Cystic Fibrosis, the doctors will confirm it by a sweat test (collecting some of your sweat to do tests on). If you have Cystic Fibrosis the doctor may recommend other tests to find out what caused it, what parts of your body is infected, to see how much you can breath, how fast you can breath, and how well you can breath. A sputum culture test tests if you have a more advanced Cystic Fibrosis disease that needs serious care.

**Treatment: ** There is no cure for Cystic Fibrosis. There are treatments to make it better, prevent lung infections, remove thick sticky mucus from your lungs, prevent dehydration, and provide nutrition to your body. Some treatments that help are chest physical therapy, exercise, and medicines.

**Research: ** Researchers have been trying to find a cure for a long time now. Gene therapy is one of the options. The hope is that by using gene therapy, they can correct the genetic effect that causes Cystic Fibrosis. Another way that they are trying to research more is VX-770 which is medicine that a person with Cystic Fibrosis can take and it will hopefully fix and restore the gene that causes Cystic Fibrosis. VX-809 is almost like VX-770 but instead target6ing the defected gene, it works on helping the protein travel to where it needs to go.

**Additional Facts: ** About 1000 new cases of Cystic Fibrosis are diagnosed each year. More than 70% of patients are diagnosed by age two. The predicted survival age for a person with Cystic Fibrosis is in their mid 30’s.

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