TRANSCRIPT
All right, let’s talk for just a second about Trisomy 18. Now all of you have seen a person with Down syndrome, I’m guessing again. But Trisomy 18 or Trisomy 13? Have any of you met a person with these syndromes or conditions? Perhaps. Yeah, you didn’t, probably. Because they don’t do so well. They generally don’t even make it home. It’s only a few a small percentage of children with Trisomy 18 or Trisomy 13 that actually make it home. Some live for a few years. There are just a handful who live to four or five. They don’t ever walk or talk and they certainly are much more limited. So there are more severe problems but they’re less common and they don’t last as long.
So, when we talk about genetic screening for the kinds of things that we can actually test for, the big one is Down syndrome. Again, although it’s uncommon, that’s the primary thing. And then we do screen for Trisomy 18, and Trisomy 13, to some degree, with things like ultrasound and some of the blood tests we’ll talk about.