The nature and causes of children's grammatical difficulties: Evidence from an intervention to improve past tense marking in children with down syndrome

Genetics is a key discipline in medicine, but also a clinical discipline with medical and social implications. The interest in reducing the number of genetic disorders and recognizing the risk of them repeating when a family confronts itself with a genetic anomaly becomes more and more important in the hierarchy of prophylactic emergencies. Presenting themselves as metabolic diseases (monogenic mutations) or malformations (polygenic and multifactorial heredity) because of their frequency, these disorders position themselves on an ascendant curve. They become difficult to deal with for the society, for the family and for the interested individual and cause emotional disorders. The Down syndrome is the most frequent type of genetic disorder. It is characterized by a specific set of signs and symptoms. People with Down syndrome require special medical care that, apart from the family, must include a team of doctors of various specializations and also a dentist. They are predisposed to hearing and sight disorders and thyroid problems as well. In 50% of the cases there are also anomalies of the heart, and the risk of leukaemia is 20 times higher. Some of them even develop an Alzheimer type dementia during their life. The people with Down syndrome can have an average IQ up to a moderate form of handicap. In particular, the studies on Down syndrome in dentistry are quite frequent, but they focus more on cavities, periodontal disease and hypodontia. In spite of this, the connection of Down syndrome and dental eruption is less studied. Consequently, the present study is intended to fill this missing part from the specialized literature, focusing on the relation between the Down syndrome and the chronological and dental ages in children. The health of the oral cavity is neglected in these patients, their parents focusing more on the treatment of the other systemic disorders of their children; the lack of interest is reflected in their poor oral hygiene.The trial group included 94 children with mixt dentition, aged between 6 and 12, divided as follows: 36 children with Down syndrome enrolled at the Educational Centre for Inclusive Education no. 1 of Tg. Mures and Alpha Transilvana Foundation. The chronology and the eruption sequences are subjected to certain variations and they are influenced by the presence of cavities, the premature loss or, on the contrary, the prolonged retention of deciduous teeth as well as dental anchylosis. Dental maturation is less subjected to variations, as it is a progressive, continuous and cumulative process. The presence of Down syndrome in children generates a delay in teeth eruption by 1.27 years compared to the data identified in the specialized literature and to the information obtained on the healthy children included in the study.

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