The Relevance of Speech Therapy: A Physician's Viewpoint

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Re: Our genetic make-up

From: Nathan Lavid
Date: 10/22/02
Time: 1:13:15 AM
Remote Name: 66.171.51.165

Comments

Hello Hollie,

Good question. The current thinking on genetic conditions that do not show complete penetrance, for example diabetes and mostly likely developmental stuttering, is that the environment does influence expression of the condition. This concept is referred to as the stress-diathesis model.

This model is best explained with the diabetes example. Presently, there is an epidemic of adolescents with diabetes, which has been correlated with the increased incidence of obesity in adolescents. However, not all obese adolescents develop juvenile diabetes. The thinking is that obesity is the stress that causes those adolescents genetically predisposed to diabetes to express the condition.

This model can be extended to developmental stuttering, but the nature of the environmental stressor is not well understood. Also, developmental stuttering is more complicated than diabetes. For example, the course is variable and there is a large cohort of children who recover spontaneously. Thank you for the question, Nathan


Last changed: September 12, 2005