The discovery took place in the laboratory of Raymond Turpin at the Hôpital Trousseau in Paris, France. Jérôme Lejeune and Marthe Gautier were both his students.As a result of this discovery, the condition became known as trisomy 21. Even before the discovery of its cause, the presence of the syndrome in all races, its association with older maternal age, and its rarity of recurrence had been noticed. Medical texts had assumed it was caused by a combination of inheritable factors that had not been identified. Other theories had focused on injuries sustained during birth. Society and culture
Name
Due to his perception that children with Down syndrome shared facial similarities with those of Blumenbachs Mongolian race, John Langdon Down used the term "mongoloid". He felt that the existence of Down syndrome confirmed that all peoples were genetically related. In the 1950s with discovery of the underlying cause as being related to chromosomes, concerns about the race-based nature of the name increased.In 1961, a group of nineteen scientists suggested that "mongolism" had "misleading connotations" and had become "an embarrassing term". The World Health Organization (WHO) dropped the term in 1965 after a request by the delegation from the Mongolian Peoples Republic. While the term mongoloid (also mongolism, Mongolian imbecility or idiocy) continued to be used until the early 1980s, it is now considered unacceptable and is no longer in common use.In 1975, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) convened a conference to standardize the naming and recommended replacing the possessive form, "Downs syndrome" with "Down syndrome".
Two efforts being studied are the use stem cells and gene therapy. Other methods being studied include the use of antioxidants, gamma secretase inhibition, adrenergic agonists, and memantine. Research is often carried out on an animal model, the Ts65Dn mouse. Other hominids
Down syndrome may also occur in hominids other than humans. In great apes chromosome 22 corresponds to the human chromosome 21 and thus trisomy 22 causes Down syndrome in apes. The condition was observed in a common chimpanzee in 1969 and a Bornean orangutan in 1979, but neither lived very long. The common chimpanzee Kanako (born around 1993, in Japan) has become the longest-lived known example of this condition. Kanako has some of the same symptoms that are common in human Down syndrome. It is unknown how common this condition is in chimps but it is plausible it could be roughly as common as Down syndrome is in humans. In popular culture
Struck by Lightning, an Australian film by Jerzy Domaradzki and starring Garry McDonald, is a comedy-drama depicting the efforts by a newly appointed physical education teacher to introduce soccer to a specialized school for youths with Down syndrome. References
External links
Thompson, S.B.N. (2000). "The Central Executive System in people with Downs syndrome and dementia". Clinical Gerontologist. 21 (3): 3–32. Taylor & Francis (Routledge). DOI 10.1300/j018v21n03_02. eISSN 1545-2301. OCLC 1106716083. S2CID 218575706. Thompson, S.B.N. (2000). "Investigation into Downs syndrome and dementia". Journal of the Association of Practitioners in Learning Disability, 17(3): 10–14. Thompson, S.B.N. (1999).