Birth Defects

Birth Defects - What are they? | How do they occcur?

It is the most terrible thing for a mother to find out that her baby has any birth defect. One of the most frequent birth defects is a congenital problem of the baby’s heart. Nowadays these problems can be treated by modern surgery, even if your baby is new born.

Birth Defects

Birth defects can be defined as abnormalities of function, structure or body metabolism which are detected at birth. The problems have as results physical or mental disabilities or can even be lethal. There are over 4,000 various birth defects which range from tiny to significant, and even if most of them may be cured or treated, they can be considered the main reason of death in the first year of the life of the baby.
From recent statistics, approximately 150,000 babies are born having birth defects every year in the U.S . Birth defects may be produced by environmental, genetic, unknown factors.
Metabolic or structural defects are the ones in which they appear if a specific part of the body is miabsent or it is formed improperly or if there is a native problem in the chemistry of the body. Apart from heart defects, there are some other popular structural defects like spina bifida that is a disfunction in which the male urethra, where urine comes out of the penis is not in the right location. Defects in metabolism influences a single child among 3,500 babies. It often means a missing enzyme or an enzyme which was incorrectly formed. This kind of defect may be dangerous or even deadly, but doesn’t always produce any obvious abnormalities in the baby. A metabolic defect is also Tay-Sachs disease that is a lethal disease which influences the central nervous system and phenylketonuria, that influences the method by which the body handles protein.
Most of the times mothers are guilty because of these birth defects, as they don’t stop smoking during pregnancy, or they drink alcohol or they don’t respect a healthy eating diet. Moreover birth defects occur in regions with a highly radioactive structure of the atmosphere like Cernobil.
Finally mothers should avoid X ray consultations during the pregnancy, as well as the consumption of medicine or dying their hair or their eye brows and eye lashes.