With new prenatal tests for Down syndrome on the horizon promising to be safer, more accurate, and available to women earlier in pregnancy, the medical community must come together and engage in dialogue about the impact of existing and expected tests, argues a new leading article published Online First by Archives of Disease in Childhood.

A study in the Aug. 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine shows that adults with Down syndrome also frequently suffer from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). However, complications of untreated OSA such as cardiovascular disease, daytime sleepiness and impaired cognitive functioning overlap with the manifestations of Down syndrome; therefore, obstructive sleep apnea may not be detected.

Most cancers are rare in people with Down syndrome, whose overall cancer mortality is below 10 percent of that in the general population. Since they have an extra copy of chromosome 21, it's been proposed that people with Down syndrome may be getting an extra dose of one or more cancer-protective genes.

Down syndrome, the most commonly identified cause of cognitive impairment, occurs in approximately 1-in-700 births in the United States. Additionally, nearly 80 percent of fetuses with Down syndrome are lost before birth.

Researchers at the University of Denver (DU) Morgridge College of Education are conducting a groundbreaking study that will compare two early literacy intervention approaches to educating young children with Down syndrome.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have developed a new prenatal blood test that accurately detected Down syndrome and two other serious chromosomal defects in a small study of 18 pregnant women. If confirmed in larger trials, they say, the test would offer a safer and faster alternative to invasive prenatal tests such as amniocentesis that pose a small risk of miscarriage.

In the world of Down syndrome, 'Mr. C' is a rarity. A real person whose progress has been tracked for the past 16 years, at seventy, 'Mr. C' has well surpassed the average life expectancy of a person with Down syndrome, currently in the late fifties, but in the teens when 'Mr. C' was born. Further, 'Mr. C' does not exhibit clinical symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, which is almost a given for people with typical Down syndrome over 65 yeas of age.

Scientists investigating the mechanisms of Down Syndrome (DS) have revealed the earliest developmental changes in embryonic stem cells caused by an extra copy of human chromosome 21 – the aberrant inheritance of which results in the condition. Their study is published online today (Thursday 4 September) in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Children with Down Syndrome sleep poorly, with more fragmented sleep and frequent awakenings compared to typically developing children, according to a research abstract that will be presented on Tuesday at SLEEP 2008, the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).

There’s new hope for breast cancer research, and it’s coming from a very unlikely place. Researchers at the Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences recently published articles in the journals Molecular and Cellular Biology and Carcinogenesis indicating that a protein long suspected to play a role in Down Syndrome may also contribute to treating this devastating disease.

Starting Down syndrome infants on treadmill training for just minutes a day can help them walk up to four or five months earlier than with only traditional physical therapy, a new study from the University of Michigan says.

Children with Down syndrome are more likely than their unaffected siblings to have higher levels of a hormone associated with obesity, according to pediatric researchers. The hormone, leptin, may contribute to the known higher risk of obesity among children and adults with Down syndrome.