Among other health problems, cystic fibrosis compromises the lungs’ ability to fight infection and breathe efficiently, making it the most lethal genetic disease in the Caucasian population. Patients have an average lifespan of just 30 to 40 years.
Despite this narrow average lifespan, there is a big range in how severely cystic fibrosis (CF) affects the lungs and other organs depending on an individual’s specific genetic variation, and even in how long patients sharing the same, most common genetic mutation are able to survive with CF.
This led researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital to wonder if other genetic mutations could be protective against CF’s effects. Recent findings published in the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology suggest that may be the case.
“There are some patients at one end of extreme severity who need a lung transplant very early in life, then others whose clinical presentation seems to stabilize so that they can live into the fifth and sixth decades of life,” says Pankaj Agrawal, MBBS, MMSc, principal investigator and medical director of The Manton Center’s Gene Discovery Core at Boston Children’s, who was the co-first author on the study.
