How Scary ARE Those Down's Syndrome Statistics?

With special thanks to my friend Jillian from FertilityFriend.com:

Jillian wrote: Here are some statistics that I found on Down's Syndrome and maternal age. Personally I find the statistics we get somewhat confusing. So I translated them into percentages.

I think it is all too easy to think of 1-80 as 1-80%, but it is not. 1-80 translates to 1.25 % for Down's Syndrome, or 98.75% chance of a child without Down's Syndrome.

So here is a table I made:

Maternal age as a risk factor for occurrence of Down Syndrome
Age (years).......Stats......Percentage DS........Percentage Normal
36.................... 1/200.......0.5% DS................... or 99.5% normal
37.....................1/150.......0.666667%DS..........or 99.333333% normal
38.....................1/120.......0.833333% DS.........or 99.166667% normal
39.....................1/100.......1%DS.........................or 99% normal
40.....................1/75 ........1.33333%DS.............or 98.66667 % normal
41.....................1/60........1.66667%DS..............or 98.33333 % normal
42.....................1/45........2.22222%DS.............or 97.77778 % normal
43.....................1/35 ........2.85714% DS............or 97.14286 % normal
44.....................1/30........3.33333% DS............or 96.66667 % normal
45 & Older.........1/20........5% DS ......................or 95% normal

This is from: http://udaan.org/downsynd/downgene.html

What I get from that is that the chances of having a baby with Down's Syndrome does not go up as drastically as I had originally thought. The one in whatever numbers makes things look very bad for us. When I translated them however to percentages they look a lot better.

We have a better chance of having a baby without Down's Syndrome. If I had an illness and was told I had a 95% chance of getting better, I would not plan my funeral. Would you?

I think all too many doctors are giving misleading statistics for a couple of reasons. The first being that OB/GYN’s are the highest sued doctors in the US. So they pay the highest premiums. They do not want to take any chances of anyone saying they were not warned about Down's Syndrome so they push for Amnio’s. Second they get paid a lot to do Amnio’s.

Unlike NT’s and Level Two sonograms, the OB/GYN that recommends them usually does them as well. I got a bill for my amnio because the hospital miss filed it as “elective surgery”. I cleared it up and did not have to pay. The total was about 10,000 US dollars. Six thousand of which was going to my OB/GYN alone.

So money is a factor as well. Who do you think ends up paying that high insurance rate?

Photo credit: vinvalenti
Some rights reserved

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Category: Down's Syndrome, Too Old