Whilst I was away I was flicking through my medical dictionary and read the definition of Down's syndrome. It is well known that this condition develops before birth and is therefore a congenital disorder. In addition, the risk of giving birth to a baby with Down's syndrome increases with maternal age, as with all congenital disorders. At first this seemed logical to me, because obviously with the aging process there is a greater percentage of mutated cells and therefore processes are compromised. However, I remembered that all of the ova are produced during the foetal stages and mutations occur mostly during mitosis, which doesn't occur until fertilisation. Therefore the time when these are fertilised should make no difference to whether or not these cells are mutated as there is no change in the ova over time.
A little bit of research helped to solve my predicament.Firstly, I discovered that congenital disorders needn't be as a result of genetics but can also be induced by a poor intrauterine environment, errors of morphogenesis and infection.
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