How Many People Have Down Syndrome?
About 1 out of every 800 babies born has Down syndrome, no matter what race or nationality the parents are. It is not contagious, so you can’t catch it from someone else. You are born with it. No one gets Down syndrome later in life. Now you know that Down syndrome is caused by a problem with a chromosome. You might already know that we get our chromosomes from our mother and father. Remember the 23 pairs of chromosomes? Half are from your mom and half are from your dad. But doctors aren’t sure why this chromosome problem happens to some babies. It’s nothing the mom or dad did before the child was born. Anyone can have a baby with Down syndrome. But the older the mother (age 35 or over), the greater the risk.
