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Care of Child with Down Syndrome

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Down syndrome has three different types of occurrence, Trisomy 21, Translocation, and Mosaicism. Trisomy 21 is the most common one and it accounts for 95% of all cases. It is a congenital disorder which consists of having a whole extra chromosome in the 21st pair of chromosomes in every cell of the body; the person ends up having 47 chromosomes instead of the usual 46. Down syndrome was named after Dr. John Langdon Down, an English Physician, who, in 1866, was the first ever to describe the characteristic physical features of this disorder. And it is a considered a syndrome because it is a condition in which many features occur all together. Down syndrome in general is a very common given that for every 700 born babies 1 will have this disorder, and the chances increase with age of the mother (Figure 1). For unknown reasons, trisomy 21 is more common in girls than it is in boys.
Diagnosis of the disease can be done different ways. Ultrasound is a noninvasive way that can detect most incidences of it during the 11th-14th week of pregnancy. If existence of disorder is possible, then amniocentesis and/or chorionic villus sampling testing can be done; these tests consist of taking fetal cells from the placenta and analyzing them for the presence of an extra chromosome. Interruption of the pregnancy is a personal choice of the parents but nevertheless the baby is fully formed after 15th week, which is a critical factor taken in consideration when making such an impacting

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