The Disease

What is Huntington’s Disease?

Huntington’s Disease progressively strips away the affected individual’s ability to walk, talk, eat, think and reason; death ensues from complications.

The disease is named after George Huntington, an American physician who described the disease in a paper called On Chorea in 1872. Chorea is the involuntary muscle jerks and twitches so characteristic of HD.

George Huntington’s description was based on observations of affected families from the village of East Hampton, Long Island, New York (USA) where he lived and worked; he was the first to identify the pattern of inheritance of the disease. Today the term Huntington’s Disease is more commonly used than Huntington’s chorea.

Generation

Symptoms of Huntington’s Disease can skip a generation; this situation may occur if the gene carrier dies before symptom onset and makes it more difficult to establish a family history.

Juvenile

In individuals with Juvenile HD chorea is less prominent whereas slowness of movement (bradykinesia) and stiffness become more prevalent. In most cases, the rate of progression of Juvenile HD tends to be faster than in the adult form.

Early features of Juvenile HD include strong behavioural changes; learning problems, decline at school and speech problems. Epileptic seizures occasionally occur in HD, becoming more common among young patients.

The website hdyo.org is dedicated to Juvenile Huntington’s Disease.

In comparison, with late onset of Huntington’s Disease chorea tends to be stronger, with slowness and stiffness being less prominent.

It is likely to be more difficult to establish a family history because the individual’s parents may have already died, perhaps before showing signs of the disease.