Psychological Consequences of Cleft Palate - Research Paper Example

The mutated genes may be inherited by parents or acquired during development. There are various types of orofacial cleft abnormalities. They are cleft lip, cleft lip and palate, cleft palate and atypical clefts. More often than not, cleft palates are identifiable at birth born (Wiet and Sie, 2010). It can appear as a small notch is the baby`s lip or extend from the lip through the upper gum and palate into the bottom of the nose. Cleft palates affect one or both sides of the baby`s face. There are also cases where the cleft palate appears only in the muscles of the soft palate, at the back of the mouth and covered by the mouth`s lining.

This type of cleft palate might not be diagnosed until weeks or months later. However, this case is very rare to be found. Other symptoms that may be found in cleft palate patients change in nose shape, feeding problems, loss of milk through nasal passages during breastfeeding, misaligned teeth, poor growth, recurrent ear infection, separation of the lip, and/or palate, and speech difficulties (Wiet and Sie, 2010).There are two main etiologies of cleft palate. The environmental factors and genetic factors.

Most of the cleft palate happened because of the interaction between those two factors. The susceptibility for clefts was resulted because of the genetic factor. While environmental factors interact with a genetically susceptible genotype, a cleft resulted during an early stage of development (Wiet and Sie, 2010).The Lip and palate are part of the facial tissues, being produced from the mesenchymal migration, penetration, and fusion of craniosacral crest cells. Each of the 3 main facial prominences; nose, lips, and palate are obtained from bilateral converging facial processes.