Trisomy 13 syndrome in Chinese infants. Clinical findings and incidence.

The trisomy 18 syndrome was first described in 1960 (Edwards et al., 1960). Since then, numerous cases have been reported in Caucasoid children from the United States, Canada, and Europe (Hecht et al., 1963; Townes, DeHart, and Ziegler, 1964; Zellweger, Huff, and Abbo, 1965; Taylor, 1967, 1968), but only a few cases have been reported in other racial groups. 8 African children with this syndrome were recently reported from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Cornu et al., 1968). The anomaly in an American Negro child has been reported (Rohde, Hodgman, and Cleland, 1964), and an affected Chinese child from Canada has been reported (Uchida, Bowman, and Wang, 1962). While the physical features have been well described, there are only four studies with sufficient data to assess the incidence rate of this anomaly (Smith, 1964; Conen and Erkman, 1966; A. I. Taylor and E. C. Moores, unpublished observations, and A. I. Taylor and J. A. F. Roberts, unpublished observations, cited in Taylor, 1967), and these have been in Caucasoid populations. This communication describes four affected Chinese infants born at Taipei hospitals participating in a large epidemiological survey of congenital malformations (Emanuel et al., in preparation), and derives an incidence rate for this population.