How Many Women Over 40 Give Birth to Downs Syndrome Babies

Lee Robinson gave birth to a healthy son, Price, terminal week. She's 44.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Birth rate for women age 40-44 increased 4 percentage in 2008 from 2007
• Expert: "Any can go wrong goes incorrect at an increased rate" in an older pregnancy
• Risks include miscarriage, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, chromosome disorders

(CNN) -- Lee Robinson wasn't all that excited almost having a infant. It's not that she didn't want one, information technology's just that she and her hubby, Claude, were happy with their decorated lives in Thomson, Georgia, where she'southward a high school teacher and he'southward a caterer.

Life rolled merrily along until 1 mean solar day, at historic period 44, Robinson discovered to her neat shock that she was meaning. When non one merely 2 pregnancy tests confirmed the news, she plastered herself to the internet to figure out how risky this pregnancy was for her and her baby.

What she constitute online wasn't comforting. A slew of statistics about the high risks of birth defects for the infant and pregnancy-related diseases for her scared the wits out of her.

"I'd be less than normal if I didn't retrieve this was pretty astringent, life-threatening stuff," Robinson says. "All kinds of things run through your mind."

These days, more women are finding themselves in Robinson's situation. The birth charge per unit for women age 40-44 increased iv percentage in 2008 from 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Contrast that to the birth charge per unit for women below historic period 40, which went downward as much as iii percent from 2007 to 2008.

Robinson would anxiously cascade out her worries to friends on Facebook.

"[Lee] is battling negative thinking," she wrote. "Please keep peppering her with 'salubrious, normal babies born to 40-something mothers' stories because she really needs to hear/read them repeatedly right at present."

Ane of Robinson's former students told her "everything is gonna exist fine." A college friend told her, "You and the babe will be smashing." Just were Robinson and her friends right to be so optimistic?

"Whatever can go wrong goes incorrect at an increased rate for a woman who is older starting pregnancy," says Dr. Alan Fleischman, medical director for the March of Dimes.

And then merely how scary is it for a woman over 40 to have a baby? We asked physicians at the March of Dimes and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists to set up the numbers out for united states.

1. College chance of miscarriage

At historic period 20: 1 in x women
At age 35: one in 5 women
At historic period xl: i in three women
At age 45: ane in 2 women

Noncancerous tumors chosen fibroids and endometriosis, the abnormal growth of the lining of a woman'due south uterus, can lead to a miscarriage.

"Evolutionarily women generally reproduced in their teens and 20s. Centuries ago we didn't live much longer than our 40s and 50s," Fleischman says. "We haven't inverse the basic biology of how our ovaries and uterus work."

2. Higher risk of any chromosomal disorder

At age 20: one in 526 births
At age thirty: i in 385 births
At age 40: i in 66 births
At age 45: 1 in 21 births

Women are born with all the eggs they'll ever take. As a adult female ages, her eggs also age.

"All genetic abnormalities increase as the egg gets older," says Fleischman. "The eggs are stored in the ovaries, and at that place is a potential for change over fourth dimension."

iii. Higher adventure of Downwardly syndrome

At historic period 25: one in i,250 births
At historic period thirty: 1 in 1,000 births
At age 35: 1 in 400 births
At age 40: 1 in 100 births
At age 45: 1 in thirty births
At age 49: one in x births

As a woman ages, the adventure of delivering a baby with Down's syndrome increases. Down's syndrome is a genetic disorder often acquired by an error in cell sectionalisation. There are multiple types of Down's syndrome, and the exact cause is not known.

4. Higher take a chance of gestational diabetes

At historic period 20: 22 in 1,000 women
At historic period 25: 36 in i,000 women
At age 30: 51 in 1,000 women
At age 35: 67 in 1,000 women
At historic period 40: 84 in ane,000 women

Pregnancy stresses the torso, requiring the pancreas to produce more insulin. In older women, having a infant can trigger diabetes during pregnancy.

"We like to think of pregnancy as a stress test to the woman," Fleischman says. "As yous get older your pancreas is less able to reply to those stressors."

5. College run a risk of preeclampsia

At age twenty: 38 in 1,000 women
At historic period 25: 37 in 1,000 women
At age 30: 36 in 1,000 women
At age 35: 39 in one,000 women
At historic period forty: 48 in 1,000 women

Preeclampsia is a sometimes deadly status of pregnancy marked past high blood pressure level and protein in the urine. Often when a mother has preeclampsia, the baby needs to be delivered prematurely to save the lives of mother and babe.

"Women as they get into their 40s may as well have some hypertension already," Fleischman says. "And if they do, they accept a college hazard of that beingness exacerbated during pregnancy."

Advantages of being an older mom

Working women who have children afterwards in life are often able to spend more time with their families because they're in a better position to negotiate flexible schedules, according to research by Elizabeth Gregory, author of the book, "Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Afterwards Motherhood," and director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Houston.

"Women written report that the clout they've established at work in the years before they have kids gives them a bargaining chip that they wouldn't have had" at an earlier phase of their career, Gregory says.

Plus, women who look to take children make more money and are better able to provide for their families, co-ordinate to Gregory's analysis of 2000 census information.

Gregory looked at women in their early on 40s and found sizable bacon differences based on when they'd had their children. She found that those who'd had babies in their mid-20s had salaries in the mid-$40,000 range, but those who waited to have babies until their mid- to belatedly-30s had salaries that averaged in the $seventy,000 range.

The reason, she says, is uncomplicated. "In one case kids get in, information technology's much harder for women to continue to climb the career ladder, so if they get-go having babies earlier, they tend to get stuck down on the ladder," she says.

Last week, Robinson gave birth to a good for you boy named Price, and now she and her husband are thinking about having some other child, even though she'southward 44 years old.

"It's really overwhelming to think I never thought I was going to be a mom," Robinson says. "We're both just absolutely in honey with this little baby."

CNN's Sabriya Rice contributed to this report.

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Source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/22/pregnancy.over.40/index.html

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