Healthwatch: Gene Therapy – WeAreGreenBay.com

GREEN BAY, Wis. (WFRV) - (CBS News) The Food and Drug Administration approved a treatment that engineers a patient's own blood cells to fight cancer. It's the first type of gene therapy to hit the U-S market. It has already been used to treat children dying from leukemia, who are now cancer free.

The treatment reprograms a patient's own cells to destroy cancer, and then multiply to continue fighting disease for months or even years.

A new study looks at the risks associated with mononucleosis. A study in the journal Neurology finds that people who are infected with mono may have an increased risk for multiple sclerosis. White patients who had mono were twice as likely to develop MS. Black patients were four times more likely.

And American dads are getting older. A study at Stanford finds the average age of newborns' fathers has gone up by three and a half years since the 1970s. Men over the age of 40 now account for about 9-percent of U-S births. The potential downside is that older fatherhood is linked to higher rates of disorders including autism and schizophrenia.

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Healthwatch: Gene Therapy - WeAreGreenBay.com