Essay, Research Paper: Down Syndrome

Down Syndrome

Down Syndrome is caused by a trisomy of the 21st chromosome, which means that there are three of chromosome 21 instead of 2.
Symptoms of the disorder include: mental retardation, abnormal creases in the palm, a flat face, sparse and strait hair and short stature. People with Down syndrome are also at a high risk for cardiac anomalies, leukemia, cataracts and digestive blockage. Fifty percent of babies with the syndrome die before age one.
Down syndrome can be detected by amniocentesis, when a doctor uses a needle to remove amniotic fluid, containing fetal cells, from a woman during the 15th week of pregnancy. Amniocentesis was first preformed in the 1960Os. After the fluid is taken, a fetal karyotype can be preformed to see if there are any anomalies in the fetuses chromosomes.
Down syndrome is not treatable or correctable, but if the patient is stimulated often at a young age he or she can become more socially adapted.
The genes that may cause Down syndrome are being analyzed. As chromosome 21 is small and only contains 1.5% of the human genome the causes have a greater chance of being found. The latest developments in this field of study are the isolations of a few genes which cause symptoms of the syndrome including an enzyme involved in aging and a gene that causes leukemia.
Down syndrome was first documented in the late 1880Os by Sir Jon Langdon Haydon Down. He called the syndrome mongolism because he thought people who had the disease resembled people from Mongolia. In truth, all people have the same risk of getting the disease, Mongolian descent has nothing to do with it.
The age of the mother determined the risk of having a child with Down syndrome. For women under thirty, the risk is 1 in 3,000. At age 48, the risk is 1 in 9. This is because the older a woman is, the longer her oocytes have waited to become eggs and the grater chance they have of being exposed to radiation, chemicals or viruses.
A person can not be a carrier of Down syndrome, because it is not a sex-linked disease.
The ethical issues associated with Downs syndrome is the question of weather to abort a fetus with the syndrome or not.