Brain damage in the infant-genetic aspects.

With better control of environmental agents in malformation and brain damage in infants, increasing attention is being given to genetic factors as causes of brain damage. An example of such a hereditary condition is Tay-Sachs disease, which leads to degeneration of nerve cells in the brain, resulting in mental deterioration, blindness and early death. Genetic factors are readily traceable in this condition. But in many other cases of brain damage, it is more difficult to decide whether a hereditary cause exists, whether an unfavorable environment was responsible, or whether factors in the heredity and environment acted together.The recognition of the importance of genetic factors in brain damage to the infant as well as in other congenital malformations is a first step in the direction of prevention. Our position at this time may be compared to that of medical science when Pasteur and Koch demonstrated the importance of microorganisms in the pathogenesis of infectious diseases; it took decades for those diseases to be truly effectively combated and it may take a long time to learn how to keep a potentially dangerous genotype in the embryo from becoming manifest.