Medical inheritance

Why this matters

Tooth number, tooth shape, enamel or dentin formation and syndromic oral findings may cluster in families. A careful pedigree helps identify patterns and referral needs, but phenotype alone rarely establishes a gene or an individual recurrence risk.

You will be able to

1. 1.Explain Mendelian segregation.
2. 2.Compare AD, AR and X-linked patterns.
3. 3.Explain mitochondrial inheritance.
4. 4.Construct and interpret a pedigree.
5. 5.Distinguish penetrance from expressivity.
6. 6.Recognise multifactorial inheritance.

The 12 cards in this lesson

1. 01Mendelian inheritance tracks alleles through meiosis
2. 02Autosomal dominant inheritance often appears vertically
3. 03Four inheritance patterns at a glance
4. 04Autosomal recessive inheritance often clusters among siblings
5. 05X-linked risk depends on which X carries the variant
6. 06Mitochondrial DNA follows maternal transmission
7. 07A pedigree compresses family history into a testable model
8. 08Penetrance asks whether; expressivity asks how
9. 09Real families can hide textbook patterns
10. 10Multifactorial disease combines many small influences
11. 11Recurrence figures are conditional probabilities
12. 12Inheritance reasoning in dental settings

You have got it when

You are ready to continue when you can state the assumptions behind a 25% or 50% figure, separate variant inheritance from disease expression, and explain why a pedigree is a clinical hypothesis rather than molecular proof.