Cleft Lip and Palate anomalies are the most common and the most severe congenital anomalies of the face and mouth. It’s the second most common birth defect in general. When we combine all groups of oral clefts, one in every 560 newborns is affected with a cleft (data-based 2,509,881 California births).
Translated into time, a baby with a cleft will be born somewhere in the world every two minutes, 648 per day, and 236,400 per year. If we focus only on individuals with nonsyndromic clefts, we can estimate that one individual with a cleft is among every 1,000 people. Thus, as you can see on the charts – there are nearly 6.85 million individuals with a cleft living on this planet at present. Twenty years from now with the projected population growth there will be 1.4 million more of them. And in the year 2050, the cleft population will reach 9,280,000 to 2,400,000 more than today.
These facts provide us with very strong reasons for not only improving the treatment of these serious anomalies but also for developing efficient strategies for prevention. There is already enough scientific evidence suggesting that a significant proportion of cleft lip and palate anomalies are preventable.
Marie M. Tolarova MD., PhD., DSc
2011 June