However, the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, in collaboration with University College London, United Kingdom, conducted a study and discovered that there are some environmental conditions during pregnancy that can cause these fissures.
Obesity, diabetes and other pro-inflammatory situations, such as maternal infection (episodes of fever during pregnancy), are risk factors for a child to be born with fissures.
In fact, Roberto Mayor, lead author of the study, mentions that the risk can be increased by smoking, stress, infections and malnutrition during pregnancy.
And he adds: “Now, we have shown for the first time how these two factors (genetics and environment) work togetherand why both genetic and environmental risk factors are necessary for a child to be born with a cleft lip”.
They state that Exposure or interaction with some inflammation or bacteria with CDH1 generates hypermethylation of this same gene, modifying the E-cadherin protein.
“When doing the genetic sequencing of these people, we saw that although many of them had the mutation in the CDH1 gene, an important part did not have the malformation. It was missing a piece that would fully explain what led to the appearance of the cleft lip,” the study says.
“We intend to investigate this issue. The identification of the factors that activate maternal inflammation will be important for the establishment of preventive measures for cleft lip and palate”, concluded Passos-Bueno in the study.
