Ashley Burks was 23 when her life changed. That year, 2005, she excitedly attended the Marfan Foundation’s Annual Conference in St. Louis. Upon arrival she was overwhelmed with emotion—for the first time in her life she saw other women who looked like her! Lean and lanky with long faces like hers, they looked like family. And as she got to know them, she was overjoyed that they had Marfan syndrome like she did, and they understood what she had gone through in her life.

The Marfan Foundation announced that, starting today, it is making a new app available for free to people with Marfan and related disorders – and their families – to securely manage their medical records.

During National Nurses Week, I would like to honor the wonderful men and women who serve tirelessly without much recognition. Several of them were such a help and inspiration when my husband Ted Ponder had surgery in 1989 because of his Marfan syndrome.

I like to think that I’m a fairly positive person, especially when it comes to my Marfan diagnosis. It has taken a long time to get here. Not every day is a good day, but, overall, I see my Marfan diagnosis as something that benefits my life. Then there are my bad days. They are filled with joint pain, migraines, and sometimes the inability to get up out of bed. We all have our bad days physically, but we keep going because that’s our life.

Have you heard of CRISPR gene editing technology and wondered if it could one day be used to treat or even cure Marfan syndrome? Many members of our community have asked about CRISPR so we wanted to provide an overview of this type of research and what its potential might be for treating Marfan and related disorders.