I recently remarried at 40 years of age and would love to have a child for my new husband. However, I read somewhere that women like me who wants to have babies at an advanced age run the risk of giving birth to babies with Downs Syndrome. Kindly let me know if this is true.
Ama (by SMS)
People have long recognized there is a connection between maternal age and Down syndrome. In the early 1900s, researchers noticed children with the condition were frequently the last-born in large families and came shortly before a woman experienced menopause. At the time, they believed the condition was a sign that the mother had simply exhausted her reproductive potential.
Decades later, a French pediatrician made the association between the condition and an extra chromosome that was present in skin cells of some of his patients. We now understand even more about Down syndrome, including another cause that may run in families and is not associated with a woman’s age at the time she conceives. But what’s really groundbreaking is we are starting to understand why maternal age matters for the development of Down syndrome.
Experts discovered that 9.1 percent of the first births happened in women over age 35, which is typically when we talk about an increased risk of chromosome abnormalities. Twenty percent of first births were in women age 30 to 34. For those women, subsequent additions to their families are accompanied with increasingly higher risks of chromosome abnormalities. Older mothers are more likely to have a baby affected by Down syndrome than younger mothers. In other words, the prevalence of Down syndrome increases as the mother’s age increases.
Prevalence is an estimate of how often a condition occurs among a certain group of people. Indeed, while mothers of any age can give birth to a Down syndrome child, the frequency does increase with age of the mother, and expectant mothers over the age of 35 are often advised to undergo screening.
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