Christina Laukaitis

Christina Laukaitis is an associate professor at the University of Illinois and the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.  After earning her MD and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, she completed a residency in Internal Medicine at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis, IN, and a Medical Genetics fellowship at the University of Washington. She is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Genetics. She joined the faculty at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in 2008 and moved to the University of Illinois in 2021. 

Her clinical practice and research focus understanding the etiology of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) at a number of levels.  She is directly seeking gene associations using family linkage (hEDS GENE study) as well a case-control (HEDGE) cohort. She is evaluating differences in transcriptomic (RNA-seq) and metabolomic profiles in a case-control cohort. Finally, she is characterizing symptoms of people with hEDS, focusing on areas including documenting the prevalence of degenerative disk disease, obstetric and gynecological symptoms, bleeding and bruising dysfunction, and dysautonomia in the hypermobile population.  These grow from her clinical practice and a large local registry of patients with hypermobility-related disorders. The group hopes to identify symptom-mitigating clinical treatments and biochemical pathways amenable to treatment.