What is Haemophilia?

Why in news?

• Data from the study showed that a single dose of the therapy was superior to the current standard of care in helping reduce the bleeding rate in patients with moderately severe to severe forms of haemophilia B.

What is Haemophilia?

• It is a medical condition, mostly inherited, in which the ability of blood to clot is severely reduced. 
• This disease is caused by a mutation in one of the genes, that provides instructions for making the clotting factor proteins needed to form a blood clot.
• This change or mutation can prevent the clotting protein from working properly or to be missing altogether. These genes are located on the X chromosome.
• Men are more vulnerable to haemophilia than women. It is a rare disease where in about 1 in 10,000 people are born with it.

Q1) What are the types of haemophilia?

The main types of haemophilia include- Haemophilia A which happens because of the deficiency of clotting factor 8, Haemophilia B which happens because of the deficiency of clotting factor 9 and Haemophilia C, also known as Rosenthal syndrome occurs due to the deficiency of factor 11.

Source: Pfizer’s haemophilia B gene therapy succeeds in late-stage study

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