Hi Judy, No specific connection that we're aware of between Crohns and the Scotch Irish or Irish. But of course the kind of test results I just got were probably impossible 2 years ago so this research is in its infancy. If you want to help get answers -- test. Then the scientists can get answers faster. 23andme has information on various diseases that it tests for on the public webpage (www.23andme.com). Here's the Crohns: www.23andme.com/health/Crohns-Disease/ It says About 100-150 out of 100,000 people of European ancestry have it. Jewish people have a higher rate too. HUGE amount of info on it and links. Then here: https://www.23andme.com/health/Crohns-Disease/ it says: This gene encodes a protein that regulates the process of programmed cell death known as apoptosis . Its function is to recognize bacterial components that get inside of a special type of immune cell, triggering a signal to the rest of the immune system. The three SNPs in CARD15/NOD2 were the first to be found associated with Crohn's disease. Each occurs in or near a part of the protein that binds to sugars found only on the surfaces of bacteria. Scientists don’t know for sure, but they think that the riskier alleles of CARD15/NOD2 make proteins that fail to bind bacterial sugars. This failure may cause changes in chemical signaling in the immune system, leading to inflammation. It’s also possible that the riskier versions of the SNPs cause CARD15/NOD2 to bind to new kinds of bacterial sugars. Encountering these new sugars could be the environmental trigger that sets off CD. The study whose data we report as applicable to those of "European" ancestry confirmed the association in samples primarily from France. The higher-risk versions of this SNP are so rare in Asian populations that studies conducted so far have not been able to find a significant association. No significantly large studies have been performed to investigate this association in samples of African ancestry. So! it seems associated with us, there's a number of genes involved and it has to do with bacteria. One page I saw suggested it might be that refridgeration results in different bacteria in our intestines. Donno! My brother, who developed it in his late teens and went out to look like someone who didn't survive the holocaust. He had a foot and a half of intestine removed. It didn't come back, but he maintains a 'clean' diet and went on to develop the liver problems associated with crohns. He was on the transplant list but found Kombuchu basically was healing his liver so he declined a liver. Which was good as we seem to have an increased risk of rejecting transplanted organs..... My sister has a milder case. Me, I'm into IBS. My father specializes in colitis. Our great great granddad died young in Scotland of intestinal inflamation. We blame it all on him. My father's mother and sister died of intestinal difficulties, both at advanced ages. Probably be called ischemic colitis -- as your cardio vascular system collapses, your guts don't get enough blood and they start to infect and inflame. Eventually they bleed and you bleed out. My dad has that now but it's a race to see what'll get him. He'll turn 87 next month and has a lot of issues. He was given ten years to live when he was in his 50s and had a heart attack, so he's doing pretty good but is in very delicate health now, living in assisted living, which he loves. He really likes having women wait on him! I'm not joking. My mother was a nurse, so having 24 hour nursing care is normal for him <grin>. >NOW my big question if I did this DNA test would it provide clues of my mothers family? Yes. DNA recombines in long strands, so you inherit long strands that are like other people's. Software can be used to compare lengths of your DNA with others. Software can then predict degrees of relatedness. However you can't tell what you inherited from your mother or your father -- with two exceptions. The Y chromo doesn't recombine but is passed in toto to sons except for some mutations. Females do not have a Y chromosome, but the mitochondria is passed on to all a woman's children. The daughters pass theirs on. The sons are 'dead ends' as their children will inherit from the mother, but the female line is an unbroken chain, like the Y chromosome. So you bear your mother's mitochondral DNA, BUT she does not have her father's. She has an unknown amount of his DNA. You coud figure out what YOU got from your mother versus from your father by having your father tested. The DNA that you have that matches his you got from him. What you didn't get from him came from one other source: your mum. If he's passed on, you could test your brothers or sisters. None has 100% of his DNA, so you'd want to test several, I would think, speaking as a novice who lurks on the genealogy DNA list. Due to not winning the lottery yet, I do like everyone else here: sit around waiting for matches at FamilyTreeDNA and now 23andme. However my one client, who apparently did win the lottery....he wanted to know where his ancestors came from. He employed me to locate pods of the surname in the UK. That research revealed that the surname was only found early on (pre 19th century) in Ireland in two counties: Down and Tyrone. I then tracked down people descending from these two groups. My client didn't match the group in Down. It took a long time, but we connected with the help of several Aussies with a man descended from a fellow living in Tyrone in the early 1800s who migrated to Australia. He was a 67 marker match (Y Chromosome). So we knew where the Virginia brothers came from. Also this family comes from the line of the chiefs of the O'Doherties or O'Cahan clans, though largely Protestant. As a result we got lots of assistence from Irish geneticists trying to work out the genealogies of the clans. My client paid for many of these men to test as well as a few cousins in the USA to make sure we were sampling the DNA of the three brothers (dropped off by the UFO in Virginia circa 1770) and not some NPE (non Paternity Event; ie the Indian in the woodpile syndrome). So it was not cheap, but it was quicker than passively waiting for a match. So if you could afford it, you would test various relatives to get a good idea what her DNA is and using clues you have identified via standard genealogy, narrow the field down (ie to people surnamed Shine, maybe) and pay to test them. Not a lot of people want to pay $300 to find out if they are related to you <grin>. You can find consultants at www.isogg.org if you want to hire someone to organize this kind of project -- if you won the lottery. I consider myself lucky to have been able to be involved in a pro active project. I was not the DNA expert on it -- we hired someone since I am not a DNA genealogy expert. A little too mathmatical for me....I see I have a gene for non-verbal intelligence but no math gene. I don't know what 'non-verbal intelligence' is either <grin>!! Doesn't sound very useful, though, does it? Linda Merle ----- Original Message ----- From: "Judy Anderson" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2010 8:30:24 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: [S-I] Linda's Test Hello, I am quite interested in this test myself. Is there something connected to Scotch-Irish and the Crohn's gene? I ask this question as I have a sister who has crohn's and my mother was adopted. Quite by accident we found out the name of her biological which was Shine. I have done quite a bit of studying of this name and believe it to be Irish. NOW my big question if I did this DNA test would it provide clues of my mothers family? Thnaks Judy ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message