How does someone get a cleft palate or lip?

Today we will look at the incidence of cleft palate/lips in society at large. Who is at risk? How does one "get" a cleft lip and/or palate?

For starters let me tell you can have just a cleft lip or just a cleft palate or both at the same time. Some children or adults may even have clefts and not know it!! These are submucosal clefts which occur from the inside of the nasal cavity along the roof of the mouth but do not open into the mouth- a thin skin may be closing this area so it goes unnoticed except to the trained eye. A cleft lip can occur on one or both sides under the nose. A cleft palate can be a partial one where just the uvula (or hangie-down thing at the back of your mouth) is split in two vertically or a full and or bilateral one and can involve one or both sides of the roof of the mouth all the way up through the nasal cavity and to the teeth or straight through the lip region. It is known that the facial-oral area of the "embryo" or baby develops between approximately 4-12 weeks of pregnancy or gestation. It is during this time frame that clefting occurs in the children.

It appears that one's race affects whether it is more possible to get it. Asians have the highest incidence of clefting. It seems that roughly 1 in 350 Asian children born have it. In the white population, 1 in 770 live births end up with it. You are luckiest if you are African-American because you have the least chance of being born with it- only 1 out of 1694 live births. Hence there appears to be an ethnic link to the chance you may be born with one.

There are differences in your chances because you are born male and female too. It appears more males are born with both cleft lip and palate and tend to have more severe cases, such as it occurring on both sides of the mouth/lip or bilaterally. Females tend to have cleft palate alone more often than cleft lip/palate and it frequently is less severe.

There are no clear-cut correlations made with parents "age" as a factor, however, there are "trends" seen. There have been findings that very young mothers and older mothers alike tend to have children with more birth defects, possibly related to the age of the eggs carried the ovaries. Poorer pre-natal care and maternal malnutrition are found to be a trend with children who suffer from birth defects such as clefting. Low birth weight babies often suffer from many possible defects including an increased chance of cleft lip and palate.

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