Marfan Syndrome

Marfan's syndrome is a connective tissue disorder. It affects your connective tissue, which is basically what holds your body together. It's like the glue that holds your body together. In Marfan's, that glue is a little bit weaker than everybody else's. It can affect the heart, it can affect the eyes, it can affect, in my son's case, the feet. With everybody, it's different, so it kind of depends on the person. But the heart is a big deal, because they call it a life-threatening genetic disorder, because a person with Marfan's tends to have their aorta tends to be larger and weaker than most people's. So the doctors don't recommend people with Marfan's to get into contact sports or anything that can really give the person a big blow to the chest. So they have to be very protective of their chest area.

It's like, affected about 1 in 5,000 people, so, and it's a genetic disorder, so, in my case, my husband has it, so both my sons actually, there was a 50-50 chance, and both of them ended up getting Marfans. But with my husband, his parents do not have Marfans, and we don't really know where the Marfans came from unless it came from the womb, where the, that particular gene was just affected, and he became affected with Marfans. It was discovered by a doctor, a French doctor, I'm like in the 18, 1898, I think, Antoine Marfan, and he was the one that figured it out that there was a connective tissue disorder.