August, 2023. 

I’ve spent a couple of hours on the phone today, yesterday, as well as other days, sorting out health insurance.  

My family has genes for something that is fairly common in Northern Europeans.  It’s a mis-spelling at a particular point in our DNA that can make a body hold on to excessive amounts of iron.  

Iron overload can cause a lot of damage to a human body.  In males, the symptoms begin to show up in their later 20s to early forties.  In women, it takes 10 or so years after menopause.  Heart disease, diabetes, liver damage, joint damage, and dementia are common. 

People need iron to do important jobs at a cellular level. Too little is called anemia, and leaves people tired, weak, and pale.  

When a body has too much iron, and cannot get rid of it, a complex set of symptoms begin to show up.  Excess iron gets deposited in joints and soft tissues.  Knee joints and hip joints begin to degrade = rust. - from the iron.  Liver, pancreas, and heart suffer damage as iron builds up in those organs.  My uncle experienced a sudden deafness in one ear from a tiny bleed in his brain.  The iron from the blood took a long time to work its way out, with a gradual improvement in his hearing. 

There’s a really interesting factor that started to make some sense, with active, slender people with moderate diets developing diabetes with no clear reason.  In some of those folks, a surgery that by-passes part of the stomach and the first section of the small intestine caused immediate reversal of their diabetes.  Various methods of bypass include putting in a sleeve to block the stomach contents from touching the intestinal wall in that short section, with the same result.   Humans absorb iron in the first few inches of the small intestine.  Most people who have stomach by-pass typically need an infusion of iron into their blood every few months.  

When one of my siblings turned up with this condition, he was tested and found to have 2 genes for it.  The other siblings went out to get tested right away.  So far, only one of us has 2 genes for it.  3 have one gene, I have zero.  The way genetics for conditions like this typically work is pretty straight forward.  Humans pass along one set of genes from each parent.  Because our genetics are recorded in a double-strand of DNA, one strand is in the egg, the other in the sperm.  Put together, this makes a recipe for a new person.  If, in the case of my family, each parent has one gene for the condition, then it’s a little like rolling 2 dice with  equal numbers of  YES or NO sides.  Each child has four things that could come up. 

Yes, Yes      Yes, No     No, Yes     No, No 

Each of us had 1/4 chance at 2 Yeses, 1/4 chance of 2 Nos, and 2/4 chances at 1 Yes and 1 No.  

My brother got 2 Yeses,  I got 2  Nos.  Three others in my family got 1 Yes/ 1 No, and one hadn’t tested but has knee problems and diabetes. 

This is a very common gene in people of Northern European, Irish, and Scottish ethnicities.  I have 99.7% of my genes from Europeans, and 29% from Ireland and Britain.  Ireland has the highest rate of Hemochromatosis on the globe.  Second place goes to Norway    I’ve got ancestors all over the place over there.