According to Markus Neuhauser and Sven Krackow, from the Institute of Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology at University Hospital Essen, in Germany, the risk of a child being born with Down Syndrome is also dependent on how many existing siblings the child has and how big the gap is between the child and his immediate preceding sibling.


Neuhauser and Krackow’s paper provides evidence that older mothers, who give birth to children with Down Syndrome, have a relaxed stringency of quality control of embryos, which increases the probability that these women will bring children with developmental defects to full term. They believe that this relaxed filtering stringency is an adaptive maternal response and it might explain why the rate of Down Syndrome accelerates with increasing maternal age.

These findings have important implications for the prevention of abnormal foetal development, the authors say. They conclude that “clearly, identification of the relaxation control mechanisms and therapeutic restoration of a stringent screen holds promise not only for Down Syndrome.”; Source: Springer Journals