Each year nearly 2,651 babies are born with a cleft palate and nearly 4,437 are born with a cleft lip (Center for disease prevention, 2013). The roof of your mouth is called the palate and it forms during the sixth to ninth week of pregnancy. A cleft palate happens when the tissue that forms the palate fails to form properly (Center for disease prevention, 2013). Scientific research on cleft palate is important because it helps determine whether or not a child is born with or without a cleft palate while the mother is still pregnant. This allows the mother to decide what to do from there early on. Some causes of a cleft palate include smoking, too much intake of vitamin A, and the deficiency, or lack of, folic acid (Center for disease prevention, 2013). A cleft lip or palate occurs in every 1-2 babies out of every 1000 (Kids Health, 2014). .
Digestive and respiratory systems are affected by a cleft palate. In a cleft palate, since the tissue isn't formed all the way, it makes it hard for a child to eat. A cleft palate tends to reduce the size of the nasal airway The. About 70% of patients have nasal airway impairments. 80% "mouth breath" to some extent. Since speech depends widely on the respiratory system, speech is often impaired as well. (NCBI, 1992). Wei He, Jing Huang, Wei Li, Junjun Lu, Shengjun Lu, and Bing Shi all preformed this experiment in China. The research question the researchers were asking was, "Whether or not the new metabonomic (measures the global metabolic response of living system) approach can be used to test if dexamethasone can cause babies to have a cleft palate." The researchers hypothesized that the metabonomic method could provide the framework to see if the consequences of maternal (non-generic) environmental changes during pregnancy could affect the development of palates. They used mice to test this experiment. The scientist took 42 mice all around the age of 8 weeks and divided them into two random groups.